


The Statement of Derek Hale

by Guede



Series: Of Werewolves and Tentacles [8]
Category: Cthulhu Mythos - Fandom, Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alive Laura Hale, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, And They Love Him Back, BAMF Melissa McCall, Belly Rubs, Blow Jobs, Cthulhu Mythos, F/F, F/M, Graduate Student Stiles Stilinski, Humor, Incest, M/M, Magical Stiles Stilinski, Miscommunication, Pack Bonding, Pack Dynamics, Polyamory, Scott Loves Animals, Sheriff Stilinski's Name is John, Sourwolf Derek Hale, Tentacles, Werewolf Culture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-15
Updated: 2019-05-11
Packaged: 2020-01-13 13:23:34
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 27,870
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18469831
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Guede/pseuds/Guede
Summary: Stiles scores his first conference presentation as a CT.d candidate, and of course the symposium is being hosted in Beacon Hills.Derek would like to take whoever came up with publish or perish and beat them over the head with it.  Literally.  Also, he’sfine, so stop asking.





	1. Chapter 1

Derek is used to sneaking in during the early hours of the morning, angling the side of his body with the most suspicious stains to be in the shadows and taking two minutes to insert and turn the key in the lock so even werewolf hearing might miss the clicking of the tumblers. And, since he’s moved in with Stiles and Peter, he’s also used to squinting at his phone and cursing as he tries to remember what the hell he titled the video of Stiles chanting the private-entry spell for the front door (yeah, so technically, he doesn’t need that to walk in, but also, he doesn’t need Peter immediately in his face because the guest-entry settings wake Peter up because if Peter didn’t invite you, you’re not a guest).

What he’s not used to is walking in to find the apartment fully lit and smelling of Korean fried chicken, with a disgruntled-looking Peter belatedly lifting his head from the sofa cushions. “No, go back to sleep, I’m still working on my synopsis,” Stiles says from his seat next to Peter. He absently elbows Peter’s head down because he’s been frantically typing on the laptop in front of him since before Derek walked in. “Hey, so, laundry on the right, bottles are tucked inside, remember you pretreat with blue if it’s regular supernatural and green if it’s Miskatonic supernatural. We saved you two breasts and a thigh and there’s a Thai iced tea in the fridge.”

“Okay,” Derek says after a moment. Which is fine. It covers everything that needs to be said, and anyway, he doesn’t have a rep as a talker to keep up. He thinks he’s doing pretty well just not jumping back into a defensive crouch in the hall because of all the bright light.

“Also, Cora and Scott both called, they wanted to see what was keeping you. Well, I think Scott just wanted to make sure you got home—” Stiles briefly looks twitchy the way he always does when he thinks he’s stepped into random Beacon Hills backstory he wasn’t there for “—but Cora said you were supposed to call her about some film guy?”

“Oh. Yeah.” Derek starts to reach for his phone, and then jerks as the door swings shut behind him without anybody touching it. Then he remembers that that’s normal for here, and just reshoulders his bag. “Okay, give me a second and I’ll text them.”

Stiles already has his head back in his work. “Cool.”

“Oh, here, before you trigger the bedroom wards,” Peter grumbles. He’d scooted back from Stiles’ elbow and grudgingly unfolded himself from the couch, and now he intercepts Derek so he can dig into Derek’s duffel. “Also, I assume Cora has to do with Laura complaining about the electric bill?”

Derek has lost way too much blood trying to fight Peter’s invasions over the years, and he’d actually been doing pretty well on injuries this week, so he gives up and just drops the bag on a nearby armchair so at least his shoulder isn’t supporting Peter’s prying. “Yeah, she and Isaac bought some insanely high-powered gaming computer to win a tournament and it added two hundred dollars and now she’s trying to get me to swing her the wrap party for my shoot so she can pay Laura back,” he says, heading to the kitchen. “I’ll deal with it.”

“I already told Melissa if she needs part-time help at the morgue, Cora’s available,” Peter says. When Derek twists back around, Peter has a handful of dirty clothes pulled out and is staring at it as if it’s grown tentacles and they aren’t respecting Stiles’ cantrips. “These are…”

“Set design went overboard on the fake snow and I didn’t get a chance to shake it all out. And I know already, I’ll do it in the utility room with the door shut so it stays in one place,” Derek says.

Peter continues to stare at the clothes. “Derek. They’re not bloody.”

“Well, yeah, because the monster for this one kills you by freezing you to death?” Derek says. He’s pretty sure he told Peter that, and if he didn’t, Peter would’ve gotten his hands on Derek’s copy of the shoot schedule one way or the other. Ever since Peter found out Derek’s day job, he’s been vocally uninterested in how ridiculously inaccurate and badly-researched the horror movies Derek works on are, down to the exact folklore references they _should_ have consulted. “So they spent their budget on icicles and blue pancake make-up instead.”

“But Scott was checking in on you,” Peter says accusingly. He drops the clothes and takes a step towards Derek, who is _one yard_ away from the fridge. And then, just as Derek’s writing off the Thai iced tea, Peter suddenly pulls himself up and looks…looks…Derek isn’t entirely sure what that expression is, but it doesn’t look like Peter’s comfortable with it. “So you’re fine.”

“Yeah?” Derek says uncertainly. “What, did something come up? Did Laura already blow him off or is he—”

“You don’t have bloody clothes and you opened the door correctly on the first try,” Peter goes on, still with the same look on his face like the skin _wants_ to twitch, but Peter will claw it off if it does.

Derek mentally writes off the Korean fried chicken too. Which is annoying, because he wanted the hell out of the shoot and didn’t get dinner before he left. “How pissed off is Melissa?” he sighs, turning fully around. “She call already?”

Stiles’ head snaps up. “What? Why is Scott’s mom calling?” 

Peter blinks and turns, and for a second he and Stiles stare at each other. “She didn’t,” Peter says. “Oh—no, it’s just Derek appears to have made it home in one piece. With his clothes.”

“Was Scott…did he say something happened to me?” Derek asks. 

“He told Stiles he’d talked to you earlier and you seemed upset so he wanted to know if you got back from your job all right,” Peter says.

“Oh, wait, that? He just said the actors were getting on your nerves and did we think you were going to kill them, because if you needed to blow off steam, he had something you could help him with this weekend,” Stiles says almost at the same time, his head going back down. He flaps a hand at a point about two and a half yards off where Peter’s actually standing. “Geez, don’t make me freak out like that. For a second I thought I’d missed something and was gonna have to choose between angry Scott’s mom and letting that shitty paper on pre-Columbian influences on Great Old One interpretations go unrefuted.” 

A flicker of exasperation crosses Peter’s face. Which, since it’s directed at Stiles, and Stiles can literally drag them into a tunnel covered in sentient slime because he ‘wants a first-person account’ and Peter still wants to sex him up afterward, tells Derek his best chances of continuing to stay in one piece are to keep quiet and sneak into the bedroom and try to sleep through it. If he’s lucky, when he wakes up, it’ll all be over except for Stiles complaining about having to redo all the magic stuff Peter’s ass rubbed off the furniture.

So Derek does, except he’s in such a hurry that he ducks into the wrong bedroom. He stands there for a second, checking that one off the list of pains in the ass today, and then just gives up. He’s not going to be leaving for a while, he might as well use the bathroom and take a shower.

“You absolutely reek of low blood sugar,” Peter says when Derek comes out. Then stops, eyeing Derek as he grabs at the door he just jumped into, keeps it from slamming into the wall and then grabs at the towel he dropped because he was grabbing at the door. “Speaking of Melissa, if the goal is to keep her from getting involved, I’d rather not encourage this idea of hers that we’re starving you.”

“What?” Derek grunts, now half-doubled over between the towel and the door. He’s not really body-modest (and no, he doesn’t know why that’s not an issue for him and relationships are, three Psych classes in college don’t equal therapy expertise, _Erica_ ) but Peter just. Surprised him. “She what?”

Peter doesn’t answer except to sigh and move his hand. Which is holding Thai iced tea.

Derek glances towards the door, but he’s not at the right angle to see through it into the living room. Still, he can hear Stiles’ heartbeat and a clicky keyboard, and they’re both still on the couch.

“Just eat,” Peter says, irritated. Though then he stands there and waits for Derek to hike the towel around himself and come over for the Thai iced tea, which is weirdly patient for him. And when he sticks out his other hand, showing he brought the fried chicken too, he just rolls his eyes at Derek’s flinch. “It’s not poisoned. I only do that when your sister thinks you’re incapable of listening to her.”

“Well, I was. Since it wasn’t actually me listening to her, it was the demon who’d taken over my body,” Derek mutters. He straightens up and takes the chicken and iced tea. His stomach immediately rumbles, which makes him grimace, but Peter just keeps standing there and looking as if this is really just mildly annoying for him.

That is never actually the case when Peter has that expression, but also, when Peter really wants to go after Derek, he doesn’t bother to hide it, so…Derek has no idea what’s going on. So he sits down and sets the cardboard carton on his lap, and starts eating the chicken. Might as well, before he really gets dragged into it.

“Melissa thinks you have food issues,” Peter says, sort of suddenly. His expression is slightly screwed-up, as if he hates this discussion but somehow, somebody’s managed to make him have it anyway. “She thinks you don’t feel like you can eat in front of people, so you’re in danger of starving, and the last time we were in town, she pulled me aside and threatened to tell Stiles if I didn’t—”

“What the hell—where did that come from?” Derek says. Then nearly chokes as the hot sauce from the chicken flicks into the soft part of the back of his throat. He takes a hasty swig of the tea, then looks up again. “Did Scott—fine, I’ll call him, I’ll explain that I’m fine and he can just leave us alone and—”

“It’s not Scott, it’s entirely her idea.” For another second, Peter stands there, oddly stiff, and then he huffs out an annoyed breath and rolls around Derek’s right to flop back-down on the bed. “Apparently, you are constantly eating ‘furtively’ and stealing John’s snacks and this is a sign that you’re malnourished.”

Oh, shit. “I meant to buy replacements,” Derek mumbles. “I just forgot, because that other body popped up and we had to find a wood-chipper.”

Peter’s head comes up. “So you _did_ steal them?”

“I didn’t steal them, they were just there when I was looking for extra toilet paper! I mean, if you put corn chips _there_ —why would you?” Derek snaps. And then, yeah, remembers he isn’t really in a moral position to do that, and stuffs a thigh into his mouth.

But instead of calling him out, Peter just puts his head back down and stares at the ceiling. “You eat.”

“Well, yeah. I mean, I don’t know why she would think that. I eat—we ate dinner twice in front of her, just the last time we were there. Okay, I did take the snacks, and I was…trying to not let people see me eat them, but I’m not _starving_. I’m fine.” Derek stops and waits for Peter to react to that. And, since the other man isn’t looking directly at him, sucks down more of the iced tea.

Okay. So the whole ‘furtive’ thing might have some truth to it. But he’s definitely not starving, and this whole thing about threatening to tell Stiles is kind of shitty of Scott’s mom. Peter can be pretty terrible, but he’s family and they’ve always handled that themselves. They don’t need somebody telling them how to deal with each other, and especially…Stiles has been really good for Peter, and Derek knows how much Peter is actually really terrified of somebody figuring that out and using that against him like almost every other good thing they’ve ever had. He might have his issues with Peter, but he wouldn’t deal with them like that.

“I’ll talk to her,” Derek says. Peter twitches and Derek grimaces into his half-eaten thigh. “Yeah, I know, bad idea. I just—never mind. I’ll just call Scott and see what the hell is going on there.” 

Peter turns his head towards Derek and looks like he’s going to respond, but then he just moves his chin up a little and goes back to looking at the ceiling. It wasn’t enough for Derek to know if he was nodding, or gesturing for Derek to…get off the bed, or something. And then Peter doesn’t do anything else, so…Derek eats. And drinks.

The chicken’s good. He’s maybe a little too tired for the Thai iced tea to be a good idea, but he’s a werewolf, so that too-tight-skin caffeine buzz goes away pretty quickly. When he’s done, he wipes his fingers the best he can off on the carton the chicken had come in, but he still has sauce on it and it’s too sticky to lick off. There’s a tissue box on the nightstand, so after some debating, he leans over Peter and grabs a couple.

“You know, they cap synopses at fifteen hundred words,” Peter says abruptly.

Derek freezes, halfway through tossing the used tissues and carton into the trashcan under the desk in the corner. So the carton doesn’t pitch high enough and ends up landing four feet short. He glances at Peter, and when Peter doesn’t move, gingerly gets up and retrieves the carton and puts it in the can. Luckily, none of the sauce seems to have gotten on the carpet.

“Oh, I redid the anti-stain warding earlier today,” Peter says as Derek eases back onto the bed. “Nothing short of a decomposing shoggoth is going to get through that.”

“You…did that last week,” Derek says cautiously. At this point, he actually has memorized the maintenance spell rotation, since he usually tries to be out of town when Peter and Stiles do the ones warding off the Hounds of Tindalos, but Peter still gets touchy whenever somebody is poking at his denning instinct.

Except, apparently, today, because Peter just makes a face. He’s…embarrassed. “Yes, I know. It’s the only one I could do without Stiles moving from the couch.”

“Isn’t that the one that takes four hours?” Derek says.

Peter nods absently. “Well, it passes the time more productively than seeing what your sisters are up to. I think listening to Laura go on about every single line of her and Cora’s argument over that bill cured me of _any_ desire to meddle in their lives.”

“Yeah, I know, just pay it and make her deal with the sheriff for a week and move on,” Derek says. “I told her that and she told me I just didn’t get what was the _real_ problem with Cora.”

He looks over at Peter right then, who happens to be looking back. Peter’s eyes widen slightly, not expecting that, and then…Peter snorts, and smiles a little, and smells less stressed-out for about five seconds. It’s nice.

And then there’s an especially loud _click_ from the living room. Peter’s head snaps around, then starts to rise. 

“Oh, _damn it_ ,” Stiles suddenly says. “Damn, damn, I—damn it, undo, undo, oh, good, I didn’t totally delete it…where is my cross-reference…”

And Peter’s head goes back down, the amount of irritation in his scent goes back up, and suddenly, Derek gets it. “Did you have sex today?”

Peter’s eyes snap to Derek. His upper lip starts to curl dangerously, but then the keyboard goes ‘clack- _clack_ -click’ in the other room and whatever scathing comment Peter was about to make gets lost in Peter’s flinch. Of course, then Peter looks pissed-off at Derek seeing him in a moment of weakness. But weirdly, it only lasts for a second, not even long enough for Derek to fully think through how much he should’ve kept his mouth shut, before Peter suddenly goes limp, his expression shifting to just frustrated.

“Sorry,” Deter mutters, just in case any of that’s directed at him. Which makes Peter twist towards him again and he really needs to just shut up. This is what happens when he’s fresh off set, he got used to people talking and it’s all fake and just dialogue so he forgets that in real life, it’s better to not respond to everything. “I—shit, uh—did you redo all the wards? There’s not a closet or something?”

“I finished them all this morning,” Peter says, oddly slowly. Sometimes he drawls because he wants you to know how much he’s anticipating your murder, but right now he just seems tired. “Because we haven’t since yesterday. _Breakfast_.”

Stop talking, Derek thinks. “Oh. Damn,” his mouth says. “This conference—”

“If I’d known how much these triggered Stiles’ insecurity issues, I would have told him to take the thesis advisor I could kill without having to worry about vengeance by Deep One in-laws, instead of just telling him to pick the best one,” Peter says, mostly to the ceiling. He rubs at the side of his face, looking pained, and then lets his arm flop back between his head and Derek’s hip. “This is what happens when I try to be altruistic, Derek. He’s been rewriting that synopsis for forty straight hours, and nothing I say will convince him his peers will accept it on its own merit. Can you even think what he’s going to be like when we get to the actual _conference_?”

This time, Derek keeps his jaw shut. Peter glances at him and looks a little exasperated, like he wants Derek to chime in. But then, when Derek takes a breath, Peter looks away, running his hand over his face again. 

“Well, you got home, with all your clothes,” Peter finally says from under his hand. He pinches at the bridge of his nose. “And you’re clean and you ate, so at least Melissa has no reason to barge into all of this. All right.”

“Yeah, thanks for saving the food,” Derek says.

Because he has some manners, and Peter likes Korean fried chicken too, and he’s just trying to find some way to end this incredibly uncomfortable conversation, okay? But Peter glances over, and then bursts into snickers. Derek stares at him and Peter flaps one hand, curling up so his one knee pulls onto the bed as he laughs into the bed, he’s doing that that hard, and Derek just—he is honestly _trying_ here. And Peter just—has to—Derek shoves at Peter’s hand. Then bats at it as it flops towards him again.

He forgot that Peter never really is out of it, short of full coma. Peter’s got his fingers locked around Derek’s wrist and by the time Derek thinks to snarl, the other man’s yanked him backwards onto the bed.

“Don’t be an idiot, Derek, you were doing so _well_ ,” Peter purrs, and then kisses Derek, like any of that makes _any_ sense.

Then again, it’s Peter, so why the hell Derek even expects—Peter’s sweats-clad thigh runs up against Derek’s groin, loose fabric rolling weirdly, and Derek half-yelps, half-groans into Peter’s mouth as that towel he also forgot about snaps roughly against his inside knee on the way to sliding onto the floor. He hikes himself up, clawing a handhold on Peter’s shoulder, with some cloudy idea of—getting control of things, look, he never said he was the smartest guy in the room, just that he tries not to be stupid, and Peter makes an aching, pleased noise, pressing himself against Derek’s leg. A burn’s starting to sweep out from the pit of Derek’s gut and it’s got nothing to do with the Korean fried chicken.

Peter rolls them over, elbow thumping into Derek’s breastbone in a way that isn’t remotely sexy. Derek shoves at him, jarred out of the mood, and Peter gives him an openmouthed, fanged grin. “You asshole,” Derek says.

“Well, you trust me more like that,” Peter says, even more entertained by it all, and then he clamps Derek’s hips down against the bed and goes down on Derek’s cock like he’d literally die of boredom otherwise.

That’s—sort of—what’s going—and then Derek loses track of his thoughts, because Peter is really good at sex, and Derek can fuck up a lot of things for himself, but for this, he’s always managed to wait till afterward. The side of Peter’s fang scrapes against his cockhead and he snarls, digging his fingers into the muscled ridge of Peter’s shoulders. Peter swallows endlessly slowly, deep enough that Derek feels the man’s amusement vibrating up into his groin rather than hears it, and rolls his palms along Derek’s hips. Then sets his nails against the skin, lets them catch a little. When Derek twitches, Peter’s mouth rides up till the lip runs into the flared back of Derek’s cockhead. Holds it for a moment, lip and tongue, and then Peter swallows again.

Really good, Derek thinks, blinking blankly at the ceiling. Good. Right up till Peter’s face appears above his own, looking very superior, and Derek honestly can’t begrudge him that.

“On time, with your original clothes, and nobody I need to forcibly escort off the property,” Peter says. A twist of his hair’s drifted down over one eyebrow; he’s letting his hair get longer than Derek’s seen it since high school. “I almost want to call Melissa up, just so we can mark the occasion properly.”

“Shit. I still need to text Scott back,” Derek says.

He moves a little. Peter doesn’t, still leaning on his elbows over Derek, and Derek stops moving. He really should get on it, before the McCalls come up with some other weird theory about him that’s going to work its way into Peter’s arguments, but Peter just looks so relaxed for once. 

Well, except for—Peter finally shifts his knees, letting Derek know that one, he’s lost the sweatpants in all their rolling around, and two, Peter is being really weirdly patient tonight. They both flick their eyes down and then Peter looks up a beat after Derek. 

“Well—” he starts to say, still sounding like he’s enjoying this, and then Stiles yelps in the living room.

Peter goes stiff all over, head swinging around. At first Derek thinks it’s because of the smell of blood, but he immediately realizes that’s barely anything, probably just a papercut. And Stiles is still muttering to himself about his synopsis, and when Derek looks back, Peter’s mid-rolling his entire body off and over onto the bed in exasperation. The other man lands on his side, then pulls his knees up a little. His arms are stretched out so Derek can’t see his whole face, but the sour, tired tinge to his scent tells enough of a story.

“He has to submit it by midnight,” Peter says very quietly. Then, while Derek’s trying to say that’s less than an hour away, Peter abruptly rears up, grabs the nearest pillow, and then jams it over his head. “Damn it. Damn it, damn it, damn it…”

Derek watches Peter for a couple seconds, and then looks at the door. He could probably step out—it isn’t like Stiles is going to notice him crossing the living room to the other door. Peter might, but he has a feeling Peter isn’t going to stop him. Still, it doesn’t seem…he moves towards Peter. The other man lets the pillow slip so that Derek can see that Peter’s watching him, but Peter doesn’t otherwise move.

This feels weird too, but Derek doesn’t…Derek grits his teeth and slides the rest of the way over. Miscalculates where his knee should go, and it ends up running into Peter’s leg and sliding up so that the underside of Peter’s cock grazes the top of his thigh. Peter’s still pretty hard but Peter doesn’t really react to the contact, so Derek just—lies there. He’s _there_ , because this is where he should be, even though he’s not really sure what to do about it.

Peter relaxes his hold on the pillow and stares at Derek, expression unreadable, too much lingering aggravation in his scent to read anything else from it. Derek stares back, trying to make it neutral, and eventually Peter sighs. His shoulder droops and the pillow slides out of his grip, and then he lowers his arm. He looks at Derek again, and then pushes his face into the bed. Then, just as Derek thinks his instincts fucked up again, Peter puts his hand out without looking and the palm of it lands on Derek’s upper arm.

So Derek stays put. Nothing else happens—nothing else is going to. Erection aside, Peter’s clearly lost the mood, and as much as he likes to tease Stiles, he’s not really the type who lets sex do all his thinking. So it looks like they’re just going to hang out on the bed for the rest of the night.

Well, Derek remembers thinking a few minutes later, as Peter keeps grinding his face into the bed while Stiles’ keyboard clicks away, pack’s asked worse things of him. A couple hours of this won’t kill him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A synopsis is a brief summary of the research you intend to present at a conference, which is supposed to boil down years of detailed studies into a punchy couple paragraphs that will tell your peers whether it's game-changing or obscure, and for which the word limits are strictly enforced. 
> 
> I like to theorize that werewolf metabolism demands a much higher caloric intake, with all the mass-shifting (and let's handwave the law of conservation of matter for a second), and that Scott's immunity to alcohol has more to do with processing it really quickly (wolfsbane is a poison, so if it slows down that metabolism, then Scott has time to get buzzed and hallucinate). So Derek can totally be a closet junk foodist and still maintain his physique with the regular exercise he gets from fighting off hunters and batshit directors.
> 
>  _Fargo_ shoutout!
> 
> For all that Miskatonic University's staff seems to be on the side of good, they still don't seem to mind letting students with suspected Deep One blood attend (see: Asenath Waite from _The Thing on the Doorstep_ ).


	2. Chapter 2

Actually, Derek falls asleep, and when he wakes up, it’s late morning and Stiles is crowded carelessly between them, both arms and one leg tangled up with Peter, who’s mostly a tuft of dark hair smooshed into Stiles’ neck, while the other leg is flopped over Derek’s waist. Derek spends a sluggish couple seconds thinking about anatomy and angles and then wakes up enough to realize he doesn’t actually want to know, in case it turns out to be more Dreamland stuff (okay, the cock-thing is fun, but it’s still the kind of fun Derek doesn’t want to watch in detail). So he squirms away from the other two and gets the bathroom first.

He has it for a whole ten minutes before he hears Peter stirring, which is almost a record; Peter’s as territorial about the bathroom as everything else, and sometimes Derek thinks Peter hogging it is more about re-establishing scent boundaries than it is about haircare. It’s another five minutes before Peter convinces Stiles to wake up, and by then Derek’s in the kitchen, also calling dibs on the choco-puff cereal.

After the third spoonful, Derek pauses and eyes the little brown pebbles. Then looks around himself. Fine, he’s off in the corner with all the cabinets and facing all the open space, but it’s not like he’s the only person in history to have a habit like that (Chris Argent loosens his taser in its holster before he unzips in public bathrooms, and even Scott usually texts Allison before he heads into Beacon Hills High). And also, it isn’t hiding so much as being careful.

_“Oh, hey, good morning!”_ Scott chirps when he picks up. _“So you got home okay? Great, I’m glad. It sounded like this one was really frustrating but you get to take a break now, right? You’re all coming up for that symposium?”_

“Yeah,” Derek mutters. 

_“Great,”_ Scott says again. _“I think it’s been a couple months. Oh, sorry, not that I’m trying to guilt-trip you or anything, but it’ll just be nice to see everybody. I think Cora’s been looking forward to it too. She was just telling me she hadn’t heard from you.”_

Derek makes a face at his cereal. “Sure, she would.”

But Scott’s going onto the next thing, because he is an out-and-out morning person and Derek…sort of…doesn’t mind being on non-fighting terms with him, but he just keeps being so incurably social. _“Hey, so if you have a second, Allison and I were wondering if you wanted to have dinner with us the first night of the conference? There’s this new biergarten in town and it’s really pretty and we’ve been wanting to go, especially since we helped them clear out their orbs—”_

“Their what?” Derek says.

_“It’s okay, they were nonfatal, the worst thing they did was drop the temperature enough to give people a little hypothermia, but we just bought a bunch of instant heat packs,”_ Scott rattles reassuringly. _“Allison figured out how to expel them anyway, and Stiles is going to be really interested too. They’re non-Cthulhic but turns out they are all over this part of New England called the Bennington Triangle and she found some stuff in the Miskatonic archives that was really helpful, and she can tell you over dinner if you can come. Oh, right, and we were thinking that night because that’s buy-one-get-one on the beer, but I wasn’t sure if the symposium had dinner involved, and I know this is a really big deal for Stiles—”_

The thing is, Derek thinks as he inhales and exhales several times without figuring out how to interrupt Scott, he really needs caffeine before his morning starts. This is just how he works, and he really wishes he’d saved some of that Thai iced tea now.

Somebody shuffles into the kitchen and Derek turns around. Stiles, rumpled everywhere except for the side of his face he keeps rubbing, gives him a dazed blink and walks forward a step, then stops with a faintly confused look on his face. Because Stiles is also not really a morning person, unless someone’s promised him exclusive interview-time with intelligent slime who is eventually plotting to overthrow humanity for fungi from some place starting with a ‘y,’ and he’s forgotten his goal in the time it took him to leave the bedroom.

Derek has a sudden idea, and jabs his finger at the coffeemaker. Then again, once Stiles is properly looking over. Stiles blinks again, swings around as if he still doesn’t get it, and then a faint glint of comprehension comes into his eyes. He nods and raises his hands and starts muttering all the stuff the thing needs to not spit out Celephaïs brew, which Derek doesn’t trust precisely because it’s reserved for tenured Miskatonic professors and senior admin only, ending in some complicated two-handed curlicue and a poke at the button. Delicious-smelling coffee immediately starts to spurt into the pot under the spigot.

“…hey, is that Scott?” Stiles mumbles, head cocking towards the phone, as Derek scoots over with a mug.

“Yeah,” Derek says, giving him the phone. He half-listens to Stiles try to keep up with whatever suggestions Scott is making till the pot’s full enough for him to pour out a cup, then takes it back. “Okay, if you’re done with dinner, I wanted to ask something.”

_“…hey, Derek? Um, actually, we didn’t get to that, Stiles was asking if Allison had—”_ Scott says, sounding confused.

“It’s about your mom,” Derek says, before he takes his first sip of coffee.

God, he really needed that. He takes a second sip. Peter’s out of the bathroom and Derek can hear him pushing around coathangers, looking for the day’s outfit, while Stiles is slurping coffee and rummaging in the fridge. And then he realizes what’s wrong.

“I haven’t talked to her. I mean, I don’t think anything’s going to happen to her,” Derek hastily says. Scott doesn’t go that quiet that often, but when he does—he’s an alpha, and Derek doesn’t even have to see the guy to remember that. “It’s just she said something weird to Peter.”

_“Oh. Oh, okay, whew, for a moment there, with the mess the orbs made…”_ Scott’s exhale whooshes through the phone, and then he takes a moment to move around. He doesn’t sound resentful about the false scare, which shouldn’t annoy Derek as much as it still does, considering how Scott that is. _“Is she mad at Peter again? Did something happen over there?”_

Derek downs the rest of his coffee and then grabs his cereal to take into the living room. Stiles is halfway through his mug, and the moment the other man’s done, this conversation is going to have to end. Actually, if Derek had been thinking, he would’ve had this call when Stiles wasn’t around; for Stiles, Melissa McCall is somewhere between a role model and a final boss, and he can get sensitive about people criticizing her.

“Nothing happened, and yeah, she’s mad at Peter, and look, I’m not starving to death, okay? Peter’s Peter, but we’re fine and she doesn’t need to bug him like I’m chained up in the basement again,” Derek says. “If it was that bad, Stiles would have said something already. You know he pays attention to stuff, don’t you? With the lists?”

_“Okay, I mean, I’m sorry, I…don’t know what you mean? But I’ll tell Mom you’re fine,”_ Scott says uncertainly.

Derek bites back a sigh. “He has a list of actresses to avoid when we’re picking something to watch. And a list of detours in Beacon Hills to go around the high school, except when we’re meeting somebody there. And accessories not to buy.”

_“Accessories? Like what?”_ Scott says, now sounding worried.

“Tinted sunglasses. Or aviator-style,” Derek says.

_“Oh, like the ones that—oh. Oh.”_ Scott’s quiet for a second. _“So stuff that’d remind you of—”_

“Yeah,” Derek says. “So he’d notice. So your mom doesn’t need to. Okay?”

_“I’ll…let her know. Um, anyway, glad you’re good,”_ Scott says. He makes a sucking sound, like he’s thinking about launching into one of his speeches, and then Allison calls to him in the background about Quint and all the popcorn bags. _“Really, I’m happy you all are happy. It’s been a while coming. So I’ll see you for dinner Friday!”_

“Whatever,” Derek says, hanging up. He puts away his phone and dips into his cereal, then grimaces: it’s gone mushy. Still tastes chocolate-y, but he can get that by just drinking the milk and straining out the little cocoa-balls. And then he freezes—dinner?

* * *

“Dinner, yeah, I should really be working on finalizing my slides but Scott swears up and down and over the hills of Dunwich that this biergarten is the best, and anyway, I guess I probably need to get my monthly dose of sunlight so I don’t retrogress and all that,” Stiles says. 

Or anyway, Derek assumes that’s Stiles talking, since the other man’s the only person he’s seen go into that corner of the backseat, with the pile of laptop and three tablets and random snarls of yarn that _look_ like abandoned knitting experiments but that are actually the Miskatonic equivalent of doodling mathematical equations on your napkin. If the equations were really part of a formula to open a ‘controlled’ rift to Azathoth’s dimensional center for sampling purposes, or so Lydia explained the last time she visited Stiles.

But Derek doesn’t really trust her about anything, because one, she doesn’t like him or his family, and two, she’s very smart. He also probably knows better than to just trust that it sounds like Stiles talking, but they’ve been stuck in traffic for fifteen minutes and that dog whimpering in the car next to them is getting on his nerves.

“I thought you had to have your slides in this morning so that the IT people could vet them for subliminal messaging and infectious psychosis,” Peter says, his tone just careful enough that Derek switches to eyeing him.

He still looks relaxed. He seemed to go back to normal after Stiles turned in his synopsis, and even went out to lunch with some shady runestone master who’s freelancing for the University library. Supposedly it was all about recent innovations in correcting time-degraded anti-earwig runes, but Peter came back smug as hell and with a stain in his car trunk that required the dayglow-yellow cleaner to remove, so…Derek is never, ever asking, and is just taking the couple low-stress days he got before they had to leave for Beacon Hills.

But now, even though Peter is sprawled in shotgun and flicking through a feed on his phone like it’s no big deal Stiles has spent the entire drive from San Francisco under bits of Lydia-research, Derek’s pretty sure those days are over. Which is why, when the minivan a half-car up on the other side suddenly lags because the driver’s too busy applying lipstick, he hauls ass into that hole and gets them over to the turn lane. They might have to go a little bit out of the way, but the sooner Stiles has to get out of the car, the better.

“…the second one my advisor sent me one, the one I told you about at lunch,” Stiles is telling Peter, sounding annoyed, as Derek finally threads his way into the hospital parking lot. “It totally messes up my slide on the extra-reproductive implications.”

“Does it?” Peter says. Again, mild, but there’s that little hint like he might be pushing his claws in and out of his fingertips. “I didn’t find the methodology that convincing, once you get into the citations. It’s all very circumstantial, and you know it says something when they’re relying on three generations of Waites for support.”

“What, that it’s really the same body-hopping psycho who if he’d spent as much time on plotting how to literalize the patriarchy’s treatment of women’s bodies as on cleaning up his biological studies, wouldn’t have made Miskatonic’s anatomical studies department a laughingstock?” Stiles retorts. The papers rustle aggressively and then rearrange themselves so that Stiles’ head and hands appear. “Not that that’s really my department, so why _Bio_ gets a say on post-conference publication—”

There’s a small click as Peter slides his phone into his pocket, which means he did have his claws out. His fingertips are smooth and rounded when he pulls his arm back out—and gives Derek a warning glare as he pivots out of his side of the car. “That’s what I’m saying, Stiles. I don’t think you need to worry about rebutting them.”

“Well, I have to _mention_ it or else everybody’s going to think I’m not up to date on our own publications!” Stiles snaps. A bit of string catches on his ear and starts to tug loose from the knot thing it leads into. The car starts to glow muted purple, and then Stiles makes an absent, aggravated noise, and does something with his fingers to make things normal again. “And my advisor pulled these strings to let me submit an update, and having rotated on the vetting team myself, let me tell you, I’m going to have Security sending me bitchy little texts for every interlibrary loan request for the next three months, so I probably should make it a substantive update while I’m at it or—”

They all jump, because somebody’s smacked the car with an open palm. Then Stiles’ dad, looking as unimpressed as he usually does, stares at Derek’s snarl and half-lifted arm till Derek retreats and tucks that hand into a coat-pocket. He blinks once, slowly, not out of anything like surprise but more like he’s moving Derek around in his mental list of what needs to be reordered. And then he turns, gives Peter a slight nod of acknowledgment (Peter looks ruffled and hasn’t managed to hide it yet, which makes Derek feel a little better), and grabs the half-open back door so he can duck down.

“Stiles,” he says.

“What, three seconds, I’m almost—”

Stiles’ father gets about a third into the eyeroll before he stops himself. “No more extended-checkout privileges and I’m changing the coffee to decaf.”

“Okay okay _fine_!” Stiles yelps, his arms a blur as he somehow shuts down his laptop and bunches up all the yarn and gets everything to fit back into his backpack, with no weird atmospheric effects. He sits there for a second, breathing hard, and then frowns. “Wait. I don’t live with you any more.”

“I’m still your dad, and I still run Security at Miskatonic,” John snorts. He reaches in and pulls Stiles out by one shoulder, then gives a bit of pilling on the back of Stiles’ flannel shirt a flick as Stiles makes grumbling noises. “Kid, you can give Melissa a hug and see the Nemeton offshoot in her office, and then you can go back to fighting the rest of the academics, all right? Twenty minutes isn’t going to kill you.”

Still flushed, Stiles mutters something noncommittal, but he swings his arm up around his father’s back for a good full second. Then Melissa comes out from the staff entrance of the hospital and Stiles lights up, bouncing over to her without any more prodding from his father.

Who sighs, and then looks over as Derek cautiously rounds the end of the car to join him and Peter. “I was wondering if letting them have the symposium up here was a good idea or not. The shielding still isn’t how I’d like it, and I caught three restricted-access names on the general attendee list just yesterday…at least there’s no library subbasements for him to hide in,” he says. “You do need to make sure he gets out once in a while.”

Peter looks a little like he still resents John intervening, and then his shoulders drop slightly. “I tried the coffee trick and he had Red Bull stashed in thirty-six different places in the apartment. That I couldn’t even _smell_ ,” he says, and surprisingly, he’s not hiding how disappointed he sounds. “How—”

“Oh, it’s not actually the threat, he does that to me too,” Stiles’ dad says, shrugging. “It’s just me being his dad, I think. Sorry.”

“Damn,” Peter says, heartfelt.

John blinks again, and this time, his expression cracks a little sympathy into it. “Well, you could—”

But then Stiles and Melissa come up, and Melissa’s too busy telling Stiles about the potted tentacle-tree she has (they’re still popping up in the forest, and Scott had another séance again where the Nemeton said they were ‘guardians’ and now everybody’s apparently cool with carnivorous desk-plants that can’t be kept in the same room as hamsters, because Beacon Hills), while Stiles talks about how awesome it is, and somehow they sweep along into the hospital. Stiles’ dad and Peter are still kind of chatting, but it’s business stuff, complaining about the local police. Things have died down enough that Stiles’ dad is hiring some of the more reasonable cops to be extra staff at the symposium, but the sheriff’s sticking his nose into it and apparently there’s going to be a meeting later, which is why they’re stopping by now for Stiles to say hi to his father, who won’t be free otherwise till after the conference is over.

Derek isn’t really listening to it, which is why, when Stiles loops an arm over his shoulder, he starts.

“Oops, sorry, I thought you had the peripheral scanning going, since you were matching pace and everything,” Stiles says, withdrawing the arm. “So cool, isn’t it? I think it’s actually managing its growth so that it stays that size.”

He doesn’t do it like it’s weird, it’s just like apologizing when you nearly run into somebody in the hall, but that’s why Derek feels a little…he’s not actually afraid of people touching him. It just caught him off-guard. And yeah, he had good reasons why he doesn’t just _trust_ that a random person is going to be friendly, but Stiles isn’t a random person anymore. He’s pack, and Derek’s okay with—Derek actually _wants_ that, and it’s frustrating that his reflexes won’t catch up.

Sometimes Stiles not knowing much about werewolves works out, because Stiles doesn’t pick up on any of that as he just points out new tentacle clusters on Melissa’s pet baby alien-tree, which are showing different behavior or something like that. “Nobody’s noticed?” Derek says, to try and show he’s listening.

Stiles beams at the plant. “Well, that’s the thing, I think it can tell whether somebody is allowed to see its true self or not. And that’s a huge step up in spatial awareness and sentience, and I’m just really curious right now whether they’re acting independently or if we’re maybe seeing the development of the equivalent of a neural network or—”

“Don’t worry, Scott and Allison have one waiting at their place with your name on it,” Melissa says, coming back into the room. She pauses to smile apologetically. “Also, your dad’s got to—”

“Oh. Yeah, right, be right back,” Stiles says with a hurried nod to Derek. “Dad’s going to hand over the house keys and then we can go drop off our stuff.”

Melissa, on the other hand, knows a lot about werewolves, and she’s already looking at Derek carefully as Stiles pushes in between them and exits the room. She still smells calm, and he doesn’t get the impression that she’s calm because she’s _that_ mad, but she’s…and then she turns like it’s completely not a surprise that Peter is suddenly there, with a very suspicious Chris at his elbow.

“Have we caught up on everything pertinent?” Peter asks, very, very nicely.

Most of the time, Peter and Melissa actually have what is a good working relationship, as far as Peter goes. If somebody’s trying to take over the town again, Melissa often calls Peter before she calls Laura, and Peter prefers using her as back-up over Scott. And when there isn’t fighting, they keep a close eye on each other, which Derek thinks is fair. 

He doesn’t actually think Melissa hates Peter, even though Peter did fuck with her and Scott a lot, and still yanks Chris’ chain whenever he gets a chance. She doesn’t exactly like him either, but honestly…Derek always got the impression that when Peter wasn’t actually around, Melissa didn’t waste time thinking about him. She’s practical like that: you come at her family, she will murder you and write up the autopsy report, but you leave her alone and unlike some people, she doesn’t use the time to come up with a five-year plan of revenge. Which makes her worrying over Derek pretty weird too, since last he checked, he was on her list of people who help Scott get into trouble.

“Well, as far as I know. It’s been a quiet week, thank God,” Melissa says, like this is just your usual chitchat, except for the slightly sideways way she’s looking at Peter, like she’s sizing him up for a morgue drawer. “I guess we’ll see if that holds once the scientists start coming in.”

“I’m sure John’s done a fine job of screening out any disgruntled educators this time around,” Peter says, smiling in a way that makes Chris shift besides him.

Chris has both his hands showing, but he clearly wishes one of them was on the holster showing under his arm. But then Melissa shoots him a look and he blinks hard at her. “I’m told with this crowd, anybody trying what Harris tried should be a lot better at it, too,” she says, looking back at Peter. “So if there’s going to be a grudge match, there shouldn’t be as much collateral damage.”

“I suppose that sounds right,” Peter says, brows slightly rising. He doesn’t quite glance over when Derek moves so the desk isn’t blocking any moves, but he does make a warning noise low in his throat. Then ignores Derek when Derek tries to silently ask what the hell, is Peter’s going to pick a fight with Melissa in her own office. “We do try to minimize that these days, don’t we?”

“I think we always did. I do, anyway,” Melissa says dryly. She tilts her head, studying Peter, and then suddenly nods to herself. “It’s good to see you settling in, Peter. I was a little curious if you weren’t staying too close, but seems like it’s working out. I’m glad—Laura just wasn’t going to give you enough space and I think this is better for both of you.”

That wasn’t remotely where Derek figured she was going, and of the other two men in the room, the one who clearly agrees with him was not the one he would have bet on. Peter doesn’t even clear his throat until Melissa, smiling like she’s really enjoying this, gives him a pat on the arm and then squeezes out the door, with a throwaway that it’s good to see Derek too and she’ll see them at the biergarten party.

“Yes?” Peter finally demands.

From Chris, who just raises his hands and backs up a half-step, which has absolutely nothing to do with him feeling threatened. He does keep the smirk off his face till after Peter, snorting irritably, stalks off to go see if Stiles is done with his father, but he still looks like this is the best thing since Allison got over her reluctance to shoot Scott and started tazing him so somebody could actually kill things around here.

“Look, just so you know, I don’t think Peter even pays attention to what I eat,” Derek says, because while he doesn’t exactly know what just went down, he does know it’s about him, and actually, he’s pissed off about that. He didn’t ask for this, and somebody should have, if they want to talk about boundaries.

“What?” Chris says, smelling startled enough that Derek believes he’s genuinely confused. He turns towards Derek, then glances over his shoulder where Peter and Melissa are walking in opposite directions down the hall. “What, are you talking about that just now?”

Derek rolls his eyes. Chris is supposed to be the smart Argent, and it’s been literally high school since anybody bought him being clueless. “Yeah, you should know.”

“Why, because of me and Melissa?” Chris says, frowning. He shakes his head. “Listen, Derek, I don’t know what that was, aside from Peter trying to get a rise out of her and her flipping him on his ass instead. That’s all I was—and for the record, I don’t want to know. It’s probably about your family and I’m just done with that.”

Annoyingly, that makes sense to Derek. If he was Peter, or even one of his sisters, he’d come up with something cutting to say anyway, so Chris at least doesn’t walk off feeling superior, but he’s not. So he just glares at the man.

“Unless someone’s in trouble,” Chris says after a moment, his frown starting to deepen. He hesitates, and then his expression slides towards reluctant concern. “This isn’t a real fight, is it? Scott didn’t do anything? Allison was saying some of this whole biergarten thing’s because he was saying you don’t hang out as much.”

“What? No. It’s fine. Nothing happened,” Derek says.

Chris eyes him. Takes a breath like for a question, and then the man gives himself a shake. “Okay. I…I really don’t want to know, unless I have to. You all seem a lot less likely to get yourselves killed these days, so…I think I’m good.”

“Great,” Derek says.

“Good,” Chris says again. He lingers another moment, then tugs at his coat so his holster’s covered again. “Just a reminder, try and check the patrol schedule if you’re going to be out a lot at night. We told all the new kids about you, but it’s still probably better if you call patrol leader rather than whoever’s nearest, if something comes up. It’s either me or Laura this whole week.”

Derek sighs. “Yeah, I already looked in that app Danny made.”

“Okay. Well, drive safe,” Chris says.

That is the first time the man has ever said that to Derek. This apparently occurs to Chris too, because he stops and they stare at each other for a second. He starts to mutter something about the training program and then he just gives up and turns around and walks off after Melissa. Which means Derek’s free to go find Peter and Stiles, so he’s not going to object.

“Got the keys. Dad’s getting out of the meeting with the sheriff so late that he says he’ll probably just crash with Melissa, though he might come by in the morning to grab some things,” Stiles says as they head back out into the parking lot. He hands Peter a keyring and then holds his hand out to Derek, who hands over his phone. “Chris helped Dad simplify the wards, since the rental’s so close to preserve they can draw off that, so that means you can skip the Aklo.” 

At this point, Derek knows that that is a language spoken by mostly-extinct (which is fine, because they are brainwashing man-eating genocidal assholes) serpent-people from some place called Valusia, and that he is never going to be able to pronounce any word in it right. He also knows that Stiles considers it part of standard front-door security, and he thinks he remembers the time-codes in his video where that stuff comes up, but he’s not positive.

“Oh, did we not make a video for that variation yet?” Stiles says, looking up. He slides back into the car, still fiddling with Derek’s phone. “Sorry, give me another couple minutes and I can at least figure out where you need to fast-forward.”

“Okay,” Derek says, and then Peter growls at him and he suppresses the urge to growl back, because he wasn’t being ungrateful, he was just trying to get behind the wheel first. “Thanks.”

“Sure! I’ve got to go back to editing my presentation soon as we get there, so if you want to go find something more fun to do, you should be able to get in and out,” Stiles says, half-absently.

For a guy who still wants to make a video dictionary of werewolf body-language, he’s pretty good at picking up on Derek’s way of thinking. Then again, Derek thinks, smelling Peter’s scent swell with exasperation, Stiles is pretty dense about some things.

* * *

They usually stay at the house Stiles’ dad is renting whenever they visit Beacon Hills, because it’s easier. Stiles’ stuff needs all this special magical protection, and if they stayed with Laura, they’d have to coordinate to make sure she’s home because otherwise they tend to freak out whatever baby werewolf Scott’s convinced her to train up, and also, then they have to do family stuff, which Derek thinks they’re all slightly uncomfortable with. It’s not that Laura doesn’t _want_ them there, but it just…gets hard to figure out, with her still being alpha but Peter pretty much having his own pack now, and being a family’s just easier when it’s getting together for a couple meals versus staying multiple nights in the same building.

Anyway, with Stiles probably not paying attention to Peter for the rest of the night, Derek would rather keep the things Peter finds irritating to a minimum. Which is why, after Peter sets up shop in the living room with his laptop and a list of visiting scholars attending the conference, Derek decides he might as well head out for a couple hours. Peter’s as single-minded as Stiles when it comes to research, and Derek knows he’s not going to be any help with that, and if he tried to curl up next to Peter and wait it out, they’d both think he was possessed.

“Hey, you should text when you’re actually here,” his little sister says, somehow appearing five seconds after Derek’s parked himself in the back of a mostly-empty sports bar. “Also, seriously? Since when do you like soccer?”

Derek stares at her.

“Good to see you too,” Cora says, and still sits down. She waves over the waitress, orders some Buffalo wings with ranch and bleu cheese sauce and a michelada, and then stares back at him.

“You’re not sharing those,” Derek finally says.

Cora shrugs. “I might if you get that guy to get back to me.”

That guy is a producer who Derek never wants to work for again, so he stares at her and she stares back until the waitress brings the michelada and a bowl of snack mix. Cora starts eating the snack mix.

Derek grimaces and pushes himself up enough to reach for the bowl. So she tucks it in between her elbows, which are planted on the table, so he’ll have to push himself up another two inches to fight her for it. “You should just pay Laura back. Can’t you borrow from Erica? I thought you were living with her and Boyd anyway, why were you at the house?”

“Erica’s not a bank, Derek. She’s running our business and she’s really serious about it, actually,” Cora says, as if Derek was supposed to know that from how Laura calls him at least once a month to complain that her first-gen bittens are using the emergency bail-money fund to hire go-go dancers. “If we make our loan payment on time for one more month, our interest rate drops point-two-five percent. You know how much money that is?”

“ _You_ have no idea how much it is,” Derek says.

From the way Cora twitches, he’s right. She scowls at him and eats the damn snack mix. This goes on for a couple more minutes, and then, just as the smell of hot sauce drifts out of the kitchen, Cora shoves the mix bowl into the middle of the table. Then hunches over and moodily sucks the rim of her michelada.

“Look, I don’t want to bug her because it wasn’t a business expense. Isaac’s depressed his girlfriend dumped him and Danny’s still getting over his last boyfriend so I was on cheering-up duty and went a little overboard,” Cora mutters. She stares into her drink. “I picked up some extra Taskrabbit gigs—”

“Doing what? Didn’t you get a degree in something? Like business? I remember you complaining about accounting,” Derek says.

“Assembling furniture and shut up, I needed something I could schedule around the business and Boyd’s doing all of the Etsy stuff these days. He’s a lot better knitter than I am,” Cora says, wrinkling up her nose. She waits for the hot wings to be put down, then bumps them towards Derek. “Eat so you stop being cranky. What, is Stiles not putting out?” 

Derek glares at her.

Shockingly, Cora doesn’t look happy about being right. “Oh, great,” she mutters, slumping onto one arm. “Well, guess I’ll avoid Uncle Peter for a couple days. That means we’re zero for four.”

“What?” Derek says, taking a wing. Because they’re getting cold, and actually smell okay, and he only picked this bar because it’s the only one within one mile of John’s rental and he didn’t want to go too far, but he is kind of hungry.

“Laura’s back on the outs with that Miskatonic guy she was sort of seeing, and now you two, and—” Cora abruptly shuts her mouth. She gives Derek a dirty look, like he did something, and then pokes at the snack mix. “Anyway, it’s not like I haven’t been trying to get the money together myself, but I was still paying off that computer for Isaac and Laura’s being annoying so I’d just like to get it paid off already. I just need another hundred.”

“You have a trust fund,” Derek points out.

“Then I have to talk to Laura,” Cora points back. “Look, I’m not asking _you_ for a loan. Just a guy. With money. Who’s going to spend it anyway.”

Sometimes Derek wonders if his family would still be how they are if they weren’t werewolves. Though not often, because deep down, he has a sneaking feeling they would be just as irritating. “Look, I don’t know if that’s true, and anyway, the shoot’s over and it was pretty shitty and I—”

“Just give _me_ his number and I’ll do all the work, okay?” Cora snaps. “God, you’re as bad as Laura sometimes. I’m not asking you to save me, I’m just asking you to _help_. I know everybody else makes that into a blackmail thing but I’m not gonna. I’m your sister, not Peter.”

“Peter’s a lot less bitchy than you are these days,” Derek says.

Cora jerks up like she’s going to leave, and then just thumps herself against the back of the chair. She’s still got most of the michelada and Derek can see her thinking about leaving that versus how annoyed she is versus the chances of still making Derek do this for her. She’s probably the most transparent member of the family; Derek doesn’t always do it intentionally, but he does know his tendency to just stop talking makes it hard for people to read him. And Laura and Peter both lie all the time, though they argue about who does it more.

But Cora, she’s always just not bothered. Because she was the youngest, Derek used to think, but she’s an adult like the rest of them. And she might have been too little to really notice the lead-up to their mother’s death, but she’s had to live with the aftermath nearly her whole life. Derek had kind of thought she’d gotten away without that affecting her, but this whole thing about not wanting to ask Laura for help when Cora’s stayed and seems fine with staying, and that’s Laura’s entire job as alpha…huh.

“Laura just thinks I’m fucking up again, and okay, I kind of did and this is about making it right. So I can’t talk to Erica either—she’s actually managing our money, and doing good at it, and I can’t make her fix this for me. I’m trying to—I want her to think I’m serious about this too,” Cora abruptly says. She picks out some bits of snack mix, but just drops them onto the table to push around with her fingernail. “Did Scott mention we’re dating?”

“No,” Derek says.

“Oh. So that’s why you aren’t following,” Cora says, like this all suddenly makes sense to her. Then she takes a hot wing.

Derek blinks a few times. He does keep in touch with his sisters; they just don’t really spend a lot of time hashing out sex lives with each other, aside from making sure nobody’s hooked up with another sociopathic murdering darach. “Well, but you two have been doing it for a while, and I thought Boyd—”

“What? No, Boyd’s doing his own thing, he just picked laundry duty over dishes so that’s why he smells like that sometimes,” Cora says, frowning. “And yeah, so we were, but now it’s _dating_. Or I’m trying, anyway. I don’t think Erica gets it. I mean, she’s been really busy—and Laura keeps nagging me to just have a _discussion_ and I think she’s been listening to Scott too much again. Anyway. So you’re not going to put me in touch with this guy.”

Actually, now it is making sense to Derek. And for a second, he wishes it didn’t, because he loves his sisters but they don’t want the details about him and Peter and Stiles and he’d thought that went the other way, too. But…okay, fine, this is his sister. And Derek might think about being a self-centered asshole but if he really was as much of one as he thinks of being, he probably would have less near-death experiences in his personal history.

“Fine,” Derek mutters, getting out his phone. “I’ll see if they still are trying to put a party together. But I can’t promise anything.”

Cora stares at him.

“Shut up, I just don’t want to deal with you and the conference at the same time,” Derek says. “Peter’s bad enough right now.”

“Scott said something about Stiles being nervous because Cthulhu experts hate him for being smarter than most of them,” Cora says. “You two going to murder them?”

Derek rolls his eyes. “Do you want me to call or not?”

Cora doesn’t answer. When he looks up, she’s chewing on one of the wings. He sighs, and puts his phone up against the edge of the table and texts the producer. 

“Well, you could go out on a patrol or two. We had to skip a couple so we could clean up the biergarten, so we could probably find an omega for you to beat up,” Cora says.

“It’s fine,” Derek says, still looking at his phone. The producer usually either pings back immediately, or doesn’t get back till the next day, depending on whether he’s in the middle of talking somebody down from their insurance-voiding ‘artistic vision’ (Derek will give the guy this much, he does actually understand the importance of production insurance). “It’s a two-day conference and it starts tomorrow.”

“I’m just saying, if Stiles is too busy to keep Peter from coming up with bad ideas, you’re not exactly good at stopping that, and Scott does irritate Peter a ton, so maybe he’ll get distracted,” Cora says. She takes another wing, and also, the rest of the ranch sauce. “You both get really depressing to watch when he’s ignoring you, and then you kill somebody, and we have to let Melissa yell at us.”

“Do you want me to call Laura and see if she wants to hang out too?” Derek says, looking up.

Cora raises her brows. “Is that what you were doing before I showed up? In a _sports_ bar?”

Still no text. Well, Derek’s done his duty as an older brother, so he shoves his phone away and starts to get up. If nothing else, he can just poke around in the kitchen and see if he can find—wait, no, he can’t take John’s snacks anymore. But that gives him another idea. “Look, I’ll text you if the guy gets back to me. So see you at the group biergarten thing, unless Laura calls. Okay?”

“Are you sticking me with the check?” Cora says incredulously.

“You ate most of it,” Derek points out.

“Oh, my God, honestly,” Cora says, though she’s pulling out her wallet. “Fine. Bye.”

“Yeah,” Derek says, and leaves.

* * *

There’s a large convenience store about three minutes’ drive out of the way, which turns into fifteen when Derek can’t remember what flavor of jerky he needs. He’s usually got a really good memory for that kind of thing—scents, tastes, all that—but for some reason he’s blanking. In the end he just buys one of each flavor and calls it a day; as far as he can tell, if it’s junk food, Stiles’ dad will eat it, and it’s not like it’s a secret the snacks have been disappearing.

So when Stiles jabs a finger and goes ‘ah-HAH!’ at Derek in the garage, Derek’s first thought is that he fucked up some spell somewhere, not that it’s about the food. “Nothing glowed! I checked with your app on three different settings!”

Stiles stares blankly at Derek for a second. He’s showered and changed his clothes, and a faint whiff of spaghetti is coming from him so he must have eaten too. But he doesn’t smell like he and Peter have gotten handsy recently. “Okay, that’s good, that…oh, no, oh. Okay. You thought I’m checking on the wards?”

Derek nods.

“No, I just was going to see if Dad had any bottled Innsmouth water left and heard you, and Dad totally thought _I_ was dumping his stashes. Well, I was, but I definitely missed the ones in the garage because he did _not_ tell me the Physics peeps had miniaturized that algorithm, and…” Then Stiles pauses. His eyes run over the situation again, re-analyzing, and then narrow. “Wait, that’s a shopping bag. Are you…are you _restocking_?”

There is no right answer to that question. Derek knows this without even completely understanding what’s going on, because his instinct for that kind of trap is just that time-tested at this point. He presses his lips together and just tosses that last jerky stick into the extra spatial pocket where the end of the shoebox is supposed to be.

Stiles doesn’t flip out, though Derek has seen him rip into adjunct professors who thought they could bribe Stiles’ father with offerings of Nashville hot chicken (not even laced with drugs or shoggoth extract, just straight-up greasy-hot). He looks at Derek for another second, and then he sighs and shuffles over. Scruffs his hair and looks down into the shopping bag sticking behind Derek. Then he bends over and picks out the receipt.

“Okay, well, at least you got free-range,” he mutters. He pulls his phone out and taps at it, then blinks hard. “Oh, interesting. Naturally cured with celery powder…but they conveniently downplay the sodium content.”

“It’s just what he had in there before,” Derek says. He fiddles with the shoebox, then reaches in and closes up the angles. Leaves the box on the ground in case Stiles wants to look at it and backs up so he can get to his feet. Werewolf muscles still cramp and he’s been squatting for a while now. “I just—”

“Well, now I can tell him for sure that they weren’t just getting thrown away and nobody was wasting food,” Stiles says, eye-rolling slightly. He glances up from his phone, then sighs and puts that away. “I’m not mad at you. Dad’s a grown man and can make horrendous dietary choices _despite_ everything the FDA and WHO says, so long as he understands that I’m going to hack his phone so it sends push notifications for those studies at two in the morning.”

That seems reasonable to Derek. But Stiles looks at him for another second, like the man was expecting something else. Not in an annoyed way, like Peter, but just…Stiles makes a face, then bends over and pops the shoebox lid back on and pushes the box back into its shelf.

“Also, the next time Dad tries to pretend like he obviously hasn’t mastered advanced non-Euclidean geometry…” he mutters, straightening up. And then he catches Derek’s eye and startles a little, like _Derek_ caught him at something. “Anyway. Um. So, you know, for the record, you can eat all his snacks and I’d be cool with that. It’s really nice of you to buy him replacements but…you don’t have to.”

“He knows now, and I don’t want him to get annoyed when he’s letting us stay here,” Derek points out.

Stiles rolls his eyes. “He’s not going to kick us out for eating snacks he’s not supposed to have.”

“You actually _want_ to be able to tell him I was eating them,” Derek says after a second.

“Hey, no, I can totally tell him it was Peter,” Stiles says, eyes widening a little. “I’m not looking to blame you.”

“You think he’d think Peter eats cheese puffs?” Derek says.

Stiles pauses. Then pulls out the receipt and looks at it again. “Not organic and not made with real cheddar puffs?”

“Wasn’t what he had in the toolbox,” Derek shrugs.

“Oh,” Stiles says. He flicks the receipt back and forth between his fingers, then suddenly grins. “Hah, okay, I get it, you aren’t really worried I’m going to throw you under the bus. Well, maybe for two seconds about the magic, but I think you understand this whole loving-disappointment-with-your-family thing a lot better than that skeptical face lets on.”

Derek moves his right shoulder a little and Stiles snorts. Glances down, where he’s tucking the receipt back into his pocket, and then back up, and in between those two points he’s also shuffled up a few inches so his face slides into the exhaled breath Derek just let out. His scent seesaws suddenly into nervous.

“So…I went to see what Peter’s up to and he was down for a quickie, but then he had to take a call and I have this sneaking feeling it’s about some other conference attendees,” Stiles says. He’s crooking his neck a little bit, pushing the curve of it towards Derek. It’s maybe not intentional, but he doesn’t tan much so his skin always makes Derek think of full-fat cream. “Maybe because he left his browser open and he’s got all the bookmarks for excruciating living death open.”

“Yeah, he does that,” Derek mutters. “So you’re done with your slides?”

Stiles stiffens and Derek wonders, once again, why he even thinks he can have a conversation. He’s always mentioning the exact thing that they’re not supposed to bring up, and he’s not even like Scott where he thinks—wrong, but at least it’s an actual thought process—that it’ll start a constructive discussion.

“Oh—” Stiles starts to turn towards the door. Derek lifts his hand without thinking about it, then jerks it down—but not before Stiles notices. He turns back and looks at Derek. His brows crease a little, like he’s confused, and then he bites his lip. “Okay. I need to—I need to not. They’re good. I mean, I know I have perfectionist tendencies that a semester studying the Akeley Correspondence didn’t help, but…nope. No. Not gonna.”

“You know whatever people are going to try and find wrong with it is probably bullshit anyway,” Derek says without thinking.

“I do?” Stiles says. Like he’s startled, but his eyes are watching Derek carefully. Not…suspiciously, but just like he’s seeing a couple ways this talk could go, and they’re not all what you’d normally expect. “I mean—”

“It’s not like I understand half of it, because I don’t,” Derek says. This time with a little thought, though not enough to mean he’s comfortable with the words coming out of his mouth. “But I know you know what you’re doing.”

Stiles’ face clears up. “Oh, yeah. Not—so I’m gonna take the vote of confidence, I’m not going to pretend like I’m better than I am, but Derek, you don’t have to—”

And that’s probably why Derek keeps talking, because of that little thread in Stiles’ voice, the shaky one that seems to just want to keep curling back up into his mouth. _Peter’s_ the one who really digs Stiles when Stiles is ranting on and on about how things are _exactly_ like this and anybody who disagrees is going to send the world into the mouth of a cosmic octo-toad and here are the references why. Derek appreciates the way that usually makes people shut up and focus on an actual solution, but he’s been on the other end of rants like that enough times that it doesn’t turn him on. He likes Stiles in the quieter, geekier moments, when Stiles is just excited to be able to explain something and doesn’t seem to notice Derek has to ask so many questions. So that tone, the one that tells Derek Stiles _also_ has had people rip him a new one about not being good enough…it kind of pisses him off.

Not at Stiles, and he remembers to not sound like it. “I’m not saying that just because we’re having sex,” he says. “I’m saying that because you probably do all the same stuff these other people do, but every single one I’ve met is insane with no friends and I wouldn’t take hand sanitizer from them, and if anybody’s—doing anything besides working with them, I—if I thought about it, and I don’t want to, it’d look like that Thousand Young video you showed me. Which says something, doesn’t it?”

“Like, fifty things,” Stiles says, grinning again. He tips a little towards Derek, then twitches back. Then, while Derek’s still trying to figure out what that was supposed to be, Stiles raises his hands and tugs at the front of Derek’s coat. “Cool?”

Derek feels his brows rise. “What, touching my coat?”

“Well, you get kind of…like with your car upholstery, sometimes,” Stiles says. Still holding on, and edging up a little. “It’s hard to tell. I mean, I can read the body language, but sometimes I think the language isn’t exactly everything that’s going on, but on the other hand, I don’t want to be the werewolf equivalent of the guy who takes ‘no’ for ‘try harder’ and—”

Sometimes Stiles just needs to stop explaining how his mind works. Derek does that, with his mouth, and a second later Stiles’ palms are slipping up the back of Derek’s shirt, warm and slightly rough, just enough so that Derek notices. Even if Stiles spends a lot of time indoors, it’s not always hunched over a laptop or riffling through books, and the man has a pretty good grip when he wants to.

Like now, walking Derek back into the house so that Derek ends up shoved against the washing machine. It’s not exactly true that werewolves are constantly looking at everything through dominance-submission filters. They do that a lot, and _some_ werewolves never look at things any other way, but that’s just a way to look at the world, and there have been times in Derek’s life when he doesn’t even want to look at that, just wants to shut his eyes and feel. So it’s not a _thing_ for him, getting shoved around.

It’s getting pressed up against Stiles, getting a good feel for the muscle the guy does actually have under the lousy clothes. And the rub of his jeans against his crotch, making him curse and love his habit of not bothering with underwear. The way Stiles is just really, really focused, when he wants to be, and it’s not about analyzing every single possible motivation or responding to what happened last week that was because of something Derek’s mom did the year before she died. It’s just about the fact that Stiles likes sex too.

“Ugh, wait, Dad, cleaning,” Stiles mutters, pulling back just long enough to haul Derek across the hall and left into the guest bedroom they’re using. Then he climbs onto the bed and pulls Derek after him, and apparently, Stiles’ dad will not have a problem with dirty laundry _here_.

Once they’re done, and have moved out of the damp spot, Stiles rolls over and flops one arm over the edge of the bed. Then lifts his head, like he might move that way, but at the same time he makes a little hissing noise between his teeth. Derek takes a closer look at him, at the way he’s tensed up, and suddenly has the suspicion that that’s where Stiles’ pants landed and Stiles’ phone is in his pants and…“I don’t think you can work on them on your phone,” he says. “Right? Because I thought that’s outside of the vetting system and you’d have to resubmit everything from scratch?”

Stiles startles, then looks down at Derek. Then smiles, and it’s only a little forced and is mostly genuinely warm. “Hey, you remembered.”

“I’m supposed to be making a how-to video for that,” Derek mutters. “We storyboarded it out.”

“Oh, yeah, right,” Stiles says, though it’s absentminded. He’s still grinning, and after a moment, he slowly moves back down to stretch out by Derek. “Okay, yeah, that’s true…”

“Just do it in the morning, if you have to,” Derek suggests.

Stiles doesn’t exactly agree with him, just hums, but the man isn’t moving. Doesn’t talk either, though when Derek looks over and sees the dark circles under Stiles’ eyes…it’s sort of like ‘eldritch geometry,’ the way you don’t notice those when Stiles is talking, but he’s not now and he looks really, really tired. So Derek lets him be, and he doesn’t make any effort to change that.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Bennington Triangle wasn't invented by Lovecraft or his acolytes, but some of the conspiracy theories around have grandfathered Lovecraft into them on the grounds that he clearly knew New England was a hotbed of alien activity way ahead of UFOs becoming a thing.
> 
> The Fungi from Yuggoth (another name for Pluto) is another name for the Mi-Go, who are aliens who have a nasty habit of extracting people's brains and archiving them like you would a data file.
> 
> Lovecraft's _The Thing on the Doorstep_ has all the body-hopping, gender-swapping, probably unintentional homoerotic hints you need to understand my references.
> 
> Akeley Correspondence refers to _The Whisperer in the Darkness_.


	3. Chapter 3

Peter eventually joins them, half-waking Derek with a shoulder to the chest, too high to knock the air out but still hard enough that Derek rolls over out of the way. And then goes back to sleep, because it’s still warm and dark and quiet enough that his fight-or-flight instinct isn’t triggered. 

Even so, when Derek wakes up, it’s a little weird that he’s still in the same bed. He sort of remembers what happened and usually he doesn’t stay the whole night without going back to his…oh, right, they’re crashing at Stiles’ dad’s place, so he doesn’t have another bedroom to go to. And also, Peter is holding onto his ankle.

“Oh, no,” Peter is grunting, while Derek’s mind is trying to get going. “Oh, no, you don’t. Not after what you did.”

“The hell, I just did what you said,” Derek says, and then he blinks hard enough to really remember. “Wait, we didn’t even talk last—”

He doesn’t finish because a giant starfish made out of lead gets dumped on his gut. While Derek’s gasping, Peter kneels up on the bed, a slightly pained expression fading from his face as he gingerly massages his side. He drops a little, does something to the bed, and then rises and keeps going until he’s off the bed. “We’ve got forty minutes to get him to the convention center,” he says as he heads out the door. “And you know very well what I mean.”

“What? No, I don’t,” Derek hisses, trying to snap himself up through the starfish to go after the asshole. “Hey, you—”

Except his head doesn’t make it more than two inches off the mattress, because the thing on him isn’t actually a starfish. It’s Stiles, and Stiles is still asleep, and when Stiles is asleep, nothing short of a crane is going to haul him off whatever he’s found to sleep on. In fact, when Derek moved a second ago, things actually got worse because Stiles immediately clamped his limbs around and under the parts of Derek that had lifted up, and now not only is Derek pinned down, he’s also got joints locked together.

Well, Peter’s obviously figured out how to slip out of the death-grip, Derek thinks, and then wastes five minutes trying to do the same.

“What are you…Derek, he’s going to be late,” Peter sighs, ducking back into the room. A whiff of spearmint comes from his direction, about head-height, but brushing his teeth must have been all he did in the bathroom. His hair’s still an uncharacteristic mess as he grabs Stiles’ laptop and phone and bookbag, and then, with another exasperated look at the bed, some clothes out of Stiles’ duffel. “ _Derek_.”

“I can’t get up,” Derek points out.

Peter stares down at them while pointedly folding Stiles’ clothes under one arm. Then he rolls his eyes and grabs Derek’s ankle, and yanks Derek half-off the bed. He pauses just long enough for Derek to get his feet under him, then lets go and reaches around and hauls Derek upright by one shoulder.

“Come on, I put some pastries in the car last night, and we’ll just have to get our coffee once we’re there,” Peter says, turning around and walking out the door.

Derek has no pants on, and Stiles is still clamped to his front. The guy’s feet aren’t even touching the ground—Derek can feel the dangling heels bumping his lower legs—and Peter…wants Derek to…

“Do you want to ruin this for him?” Peter calls from the hall, his tone starting to rise.

Damn it, Derek thinks, but he’s already tilting himself backward so he can see around Stiles. His jeans are over on the chair, so he can snag them with his one half-free arm and if he props Stiles up against the wall for a second, he can step into them and more or less get them on. Shirt is…not going to happen, and Peter’s back in the doorway, waving it at him. Derek bites back the urge to growl and hikes himself and Stiles out of the bedroom, still trying to get his fly zipped one-handed without catching anything important.

Of course, Peter managed to get dressed, and even if he skipped his normal thirty-minute session in front of the mirror, he doesn’t look like he’s going to get stopped by the police. Which means he gets to drive, even though it’s Derek’s car. And Peter is actually not a bad driver, and does actually tend to look after the upholstery, but Derek’s car is one of the few things he wasn’t renting after he left Beacon Hills and…Derek just would rather other people don’t drive it.

“Shouldn’t we wake him up?” Derek mutters as he slouches down the backseat, trying to keep as little of Stiles (who put on pajama pants at some point, but who otherwise isn’t dressed) from showing.

“Well, yes,” Peter says, slowing for a red light. He throws Derek a look in the rearview mirror that shades from puzzled to contemptuous. “Were you planning on doing that any time soon, or do you actually think it’s a good idea to carry him in like that?”

For a moment Derek just stares at Peter’s reflection. 

Peter sighs again, and then holds his hand up. He’s got Stiles’ phone, and as the traffic light goes from red to green, the phone suddenly emits a shrill, jangling tone that wavers up and down the scale at the exact point where Derek’s nerves fire directly into his temper.

Derek snarls. Stiles whips up, bangs his head against the top of the car, and then jerks back so quickly that he almost impales his chin on Derek’s fangs. He doesn’t seem to notice the near-miss and sways backward, groaning and rubbing at his scalp. His head twists right, then left, and then he has another full-body spasm and yelps and tries to cram himself into Derek’s lap. “I’m naked!” he moans into Derek’s stomach.

“You’re not naked, Stiles. Your clothes are in the bag on the floor, and under them is a hairbrush and some eyedrops,” Peter sighs. He’s back to driving as if Derek isn’t grabbing onto the top of the backseat with both hands to keep from dumping Stiles into the front with him. “Obviously, we’ll secure coffee before your presentation starts, but I don’t think we’ll have enough time for that to clear up your eyes before the final Security check, so—”

“Okay, yeah, yeah, got it, thank you,” Stiles mutters, twisting around and scrabbling at the floor. His knee jabs into Derek’s hip, hard.

Peter’s growl rumbles through the car as Derek’s lips stretch back again. It’s too low for humans to hear, but still pointed enough to have Derek shutting his mouth before he thinks through it. And when he does, glowering at the rearview mirror, Peter just gives him a look like the next time, Peter’s going to dump him on the curb and make him call Scott for a ride home.

At that point, Stiles snaps upright, fully-dressed, with the hairbrush haphazardly tucked into his shirt-collar so that the handle keeps swinging out and bonking Derek on the shoulder. Derek grabs it and pulls it away; Stiles just keeps pulling pages frantically out of the bag. His suitjacket’s not totally on one shoulder and Derek finally reaches out and tugs it up towards Stiles’ neck before a seam rips.

“Oh, my God, no, I’m missing page seven, I can’t miss page seven,” Stiles is hissing to himself.

“You have a back-up copy on your phone and your laptop and I have two more,” Peter says. 

Stiles looks up, but then his hand lifts a sheet of paper and flaps it in his face like it’s possessed. His head tilts down, and then he makes a squeaky happy noise. “Oh, wait! Got it! Okay, okay…okay, it’s all here, okay, so…”

Peter catches Derek’s eye in the mirror again, and then moves his chin back and forth. Derek does nothing. Peter frowns harder and does the same chin-motion, and Derek raises the hairbrush so it’s a few inches behind Stiles’ hair, which still looks pretty…well, honestly, it looks like how it always does: bushy with random flattened parts. 

“Oh, for…” and then Peter finishes his aggravated sigh by wrenching the car sideways.

Derek only doesn’t snarl at what Peter’s doing to his car because he has to grab Stiles and keep the other man from tossing the papers all over the car. Stiles twitches a little under his hands, but otherwise doesn’t seem to pay much attention; he’s now muttering over his speaker notes, talking about how actually he should’ve kept this or that reference in. 

Then the door opens. Peter leans in just long enough to extract Stiles from Derek’s lap, and then Derek’s left sitting there, nobody else in the car, looking at the rest of the convention center’s parking lot through the windshield. At least ten feet away and getting farther every second, Peter’s telling Stiles that he should wait on reordering his graphs at least till they get a cup of coffee.

Derek huffs and rubs at the side of his face, then notices that someone walking by the car is craning their head around so that they can stare through the still-open door. He raises his brows and they—it’s a fifty-something man in a suit and bowtie—screw up their face in disgust and speed up. Which is not usually how people react to Derek, at least when he’s not covered in blood and doesn’t smell like a newly-dug grave, and…he starts to turn, only for something to flop softly against his foot. A shirt.

His shirt. Right. Sighing, Derek hooks it up and pulls it on, and then he climbs out of the car.

* * *

By the time Derek gets to the convention center doors, Peter’s already sent him nine texts about how they’ve located a coffee machine and IT isn’t confirming that Stiles’ Powerpoint has been uploaded so Peter’s going to look into it. Stiles has sent one, to thank Derek for remembering his notes. Which Derek didn’t do, but since Peter literally dumped Stiles on him, he doesn’t really feel like correcting the mistake.

Stiles isn’t actually presenting for another two hours—presenters just have to be there early for last-minute psychotic-break checks—and Derek doesn’t think he’ll be of much help at this point, so Derek just texts back that he’ll see Stiles at the room for that. Then he heads for the symposium organizer breakroom.

Miskatonic usually wants how-to videos related to student life, but for this symposium, when they found out Derek was going to come along, they asked whether they could get one on properly shipping and unpacking ‘organic samples’ for use in presentations. Which means shooting Stiles’ dad’s team, which actually tends to be safer than shooting Stiles in the field, so Derek said okay (Miskatonic giving him an upfront expense _stipend_ rather than an expense account helps too, Derek’s not going to lie).

John’s not there when Derek gets to the breakroom, but the head of the San Francisco security team is, and Gemma and Derek have gotten to know each other some, with all the time Stiles and Lydia spend lobbying her for exceptions. She’s already got places for him to stand marked out, so they just nod to each other and Derek heads over to the corner where the camera equipment is and starts unpacking it.

“We have to get the morning speakers set up, but we’re saving that one for the video,” another Security team member says, nodding at a crate that’s plastered with faintly-glowing yellow symbols. Little carved stones are set out around it, and occasionally somebody wanders over with a mister and spritzes what smells like a mix of fish oil and salt at it. “Nice simple three-stepper, but the Pnakotic excerpts in the second layer will make it look good on camera.”

Derek actually _does_ know what all of that means, having spent a good two weeks in a three-way text-message group with Stiles and Stiles’ dad to understand how extra dimensions might fuck up the light, because _everything_ fucks up the light, no matter where it comes from. He’s got his doubts about whether the shitty fluorescent strips in this room are really going to interact that well with Yellow-Sign-generated spells, but if they packed the lens he asked for, he has some ideas for filters and angles that would help.

“How long?” he asks, getting out the light-meter.

“Forty minutes?” the guy says, and then he turns and pokes a passing colleague. “Hey, did they sort out the schedule?”

The new person makes a face. “Still arguing it out with John and the keynote speaker. I know, it’d make a lot more sense if they just push it to the second day with the rest of the rebuttals, but…”

“What happens when you have blood in the mortar for an entire wing of the library,” the guy says, in the same tone Peter uses when he’s lecturing about how everyone in the family’s forgotten Very Important History except for him, and leaving out the part where also, he probably started the whole mess in the first place. Then he turns back and looks apologetically at Derek. “I think we can maybe push it to an hour, but if we do that, we’re going to have to run through the process in real time, no stopping for close-ups.”

Derek grimaces and glances over at the steel table they’re using for unpacking, working out a couple alternative camera set-ups in his head. He’s not so stupid as to complain about not being able to interrupt an actual magical ritual that is actually protecting them all from some brain-eating alien sitting just outside of their dimension, but a how-to video requires a completely different style of editing from a horror movie—mostly, no just chopping it all up and letting the viewer’s imagination fill in the holes. And CGI does not mix well with Cthulhic artifacts. 

Which means if he can’t get all the shots he needs, then he’ll have to come back and shoot a couple more unpackings. He’d been really hoping to just get it done in one day so they can leave as soon as Stiles sees the last panel. His last few visits to Beacon Hills have involved a lot less terrible things happening to him or his family, but that doesn’t mean he’s changed his mind about the place.

“I’ll see what I can get,” he finally mutters. “I’m going to do some set-ups—I’m not recording anything, just testing angles.”

“Okay, just warn us so we can turn on the anti-Tindalos screens,” the guy says, already heading off.

An hour to figure this all out would be tight. Forty minutes means Derek can’t waste any time. And he doesn’t intend to, but thirty minutes in, right when he’s trying to sync up two cameras at once, his phone buzzes.

Derek growls under his breath, then ignores it. He gets both cameras sighted the way he wants them, and his phone goes off again. He actually can take it now, but getting the angles down isn’t the end of it and he shouldn’t waste the time.

He’s not going to, but his phone rings a _third_ time. The other people in the room had ignored the first two and his snarling, but now one or two are beginning to look over. It is annoying, and they need to concentrate too, and Derek takes his phone out to put it on silent, and then can’t avoid seeing that it’s the number of the producer for his last shoot and he’s left two voicemails already.

For a second, Derek thinks about breaking his phone in two. And then he sighs and steps out of the room to deal with this.

By the time he’s in the hall, he’s missed the call again. He unlocks his phone anyway and pulls up the callback number, then pauses because he just really doesn’t want to talk to this guy. And he doesn’t even think he should have to—he texted over Cora’s number last night, so they should have been able to get in touch without him, and if this is because of his sister, she should take care of it because he’s not going to do it for her. 

Derek stares at his phone. The producer doesn’t call a fourth time, but he still has those voicemails. He chews his lip, then just dials in to listen to those; he’s going to be thinking about them otherwise, so might as well get it over with and see how pissed-off he’s going to be at Cora tonight.

_“Hey, Derek, glad to hear from you! Can you give me a call back ASAP, we had a little issue with some of the footage and I could sure use your expert eye on this. Takes a village!”_

_“Derek, sorry to call again but I really—we really could use some help here. I know it’s really short notice but we’re going to need reshoots and everybody’s coming on board so just need the last jigsaw piece! Please hit me up, you won’t regret it.”_

Well, that explains why Derek didn’t get another callback. That’s the pattern with this guy, two messages and then moving on to whoever else is on his list of potential suckers. 

“Hey…” The Security woman from earlier waves from the doorway. “Ten?”

“Shit,” Derek mutters, and then he tries to look like he isn’t debating the best way to dismember someone. Miskatonic Security tends to take that sort of thing in stride, but not to forget it for later when somebody needs to draw up a suspects list. “Yeah, got it. Sorry, I need a second for a personal call.”

The woman nods and retreats, and Derek texts a quick question to the editor in charge of the postproduction team. They’ve worked together on a couple shoots and also, she has a ghoul grandmother (a detail she dropped the day Stiles swung by for a surprise visit and ended up volunteering as an extra solely so he could go into the sewers on their filming permit and interview slime aliens). He trusts her to give him the unvarnished truth.

He doesn’t expect her to get back to him right away, so heads back into the room and hurries through the rest of his prep. Finishes just in time for them to start the unsealing sequence on what turns out to be a rack of small test tubes packed in a form-fitting Styrofoam container, which looks totally normal until one of the Security people lifts it from the table to transfer it to a smaller box and two of the tubes stare at Derek.

Thankfully, the camera’s in between and it’s digital so they’re not really staring at Derek. It just feels like it, with a side of chilly, crawling skin, and he’s more than happy to shut off the camera and go back out into the hall for a breather. And that’s when the editor calls him back.

 _“Yeah, they lost the footage,”_ she says.

Derek thinks about dismembering the producer with a dull knife.

 _“Look, trust me, we really have tried everything,”_ the editor sighs, with enough of a subsonic burr to her voice to make Derek think twice about snapping at her, no matter how annoyed he is. _“Memory’s unrecoverable and we’ve sent a zillion messages to the IT help email, but we’re not getting the download back either, and I don’t really feel like calling my grandmother. Hourly on this isn’t worth calling up Nodens for. So…”_

“So they managed to wipe out all of the shots for the only close-up monster kill scene we had,” Derek finally says.

 _“If I had something I could edit with, we wouldn’t be talking,”_ the editor snaps. Then she moves around a little, somebody talking in the background, and when she comes back on, she sounds slightly less ruffled. _“I know Nadia has another shoot this weekend so we can’t do reshoots for at least a week, and he’s just working through the list. Take a couple days off, then call me back, all right? I’m going to see if we can cobble together anything from the other death scenes, and maybe we can just narrow this to the actual attack.”_

Derek swallows back the urge to bite something. “Yeah. Okay. Let me know.”

The editor promises she will, and then hangs up. He doesn’t take offense; she’s probably more in the shit right now than he is, what with having to keep on editing without having any idea what the showpiece death scene is going to look like. And they were saving all of the CGI budget for that scene, too, which she’ll have to put off now since it’ll have to be rescoped once the new footage is in, and…Derek just doesn’t want to have to go back. Damn it.

“Hey, are we good?” the Security guy asks.

When Derek looks up, the guy raises his brows a little, letting Derek know that maybe his face isn’t friendly. He doesn’t reach for a weapon or anything, just looks like this isn’t what he really wants to deal with either until Derek gives himself a shake and grimaces an apology. “Sorry. Yeah, do you need me to pack up?”

“Yeah. We have to clear the room for the next one, it’s straight from the Leng plateau and we need the room for the Tcho-Tcho scrubbers,” the guy says.

“Got it,” Derek says, even though he really doesn’t. He remembers Stiles mentioning Tcho-Tcho at some point, but not whether they’re cosmic tentacle aliens or resident Earth people who just really love the idea of being mashed into oblivion by cosmic tentacle aliens. 

Either way, being here isn’t helping his mood. So he goes back into the room and does what he needs to do—including making sure that his footage _here_ is fully uploaded to Miskatonic’s private cloud-storage system. At least he knows that isn’t going to get accidentally wiped by some drunk moron who promised an exclusive Indiegogo sneak peek to some people.

“Oh, Derek,” says John from behind him, like Derek isn’t supposed to be here.

“I’m almost done, I just need to get this shut down,” Derek says, glaring at the laptop that is still blinking at him. “I know, Leng stuff, I need to get out. I will.”

“Well, great, you should, but…I thought you were going to see Stiles’ presentation?” John asks.

 _Shit_.

* * *

“You didn’t really want to watch that shitshow anyway,” Stiles says in a pained, tired voice as he slumps in a folding chair. He smooths his hand over his face, then lets it flop down. His fingers seem to snag on his tie by accident, and then he sighs and yanks that out another inch. “I mean, it was pretty esoteric, even by Cthulhic scholarly standards.”

“You mean eldritch, right?” Scott offers in a hopeful tone.

Stiles looks over at the man sitting next to him, blinking, and for a second his expression brightens. But then his eyes shift to something over Derek’s shoulder and he slumps back down. “No, not…it’s not eldritch. He has a point, I really should have thought about at least consulting the Averoigne School, what with the werewolf preferences. It’s only just a hop and skip over from Gévaudan, after all.”

“Well, I don’t know, I think they’re farther apart than that,” Scott says.

That earns him a snort from Stiles, though Derek is too busy staring into the lecture hall to check whether that’s just Stiles trying to make Scott feel better about not making him feel better, or if Stiles really is cheering up. “Shit,” he mutters.

“Yeah, I don’t…think that’s the best idea,” Allison, standing next to him and also watching Peter, says. She presses her lips together. “Not that he doesn’t deserve it, honestly, but I just don’t think Peter’s going to win that one.”

Derek glances over at her.

“Well, you weren’t here. He made his point after the first question, even I could tell that and I don’t know anything about comparative herbalry traditions,” Allison goes on. “He could’ve just waited till the break and followed up with Stiles, but he had to do it in front of every—oh, you mean Peter.”

“He was looking up everybody’s bio last night for a kill list,” Derek says, and then he remembers that even if she’s Stiles’ friend, she’s still an Argent. “It was for therapy.”

Now Allison looks at him. “You know nobody buys that one anymore, right? Not even Scott,” she says, though weirdly, she sounds more amused than accusing. “Anyway, I vote we just go get beer early. The presentation’s over and nobody’s even here to see if that guy changes his mind, which I’m pretty sure he’s not going to.”

“That’s a good point, you know,” Scott says earnestly. “There’s a whole second day and I think you said a bunch of heavy-hitters are speaking tomorrow, right? I’m sure nobody’s going to think about your—not that it was _forgettable_ , because—”

“No, it’s okay, I know you didn’t really understand anything except for slide six,” Stiles says with a small, tired smile. He heaves himself up out of his chair and then peers around Derek, giving his shirt an absent tug. Then his eyes widen and he half-leaps, half-stumbles between Derek and Allison. “Oh, whoa, no, Peter should not be tangling with—hang on, be right back.”

The man doesn’t look like that much. Middle-aged, slightly-beaten khaki slacks, fading ginger hair. Doesn’t smell like that much either: no fish-salt-rancid oil in there so he doesn’t have Deep One ancestry, no earth-meat so probably no ghoul blood, and like Stiles keeps reminding them, Cthulhic crazy doesn’t really work at hiding itself and this guy has been politely facing Peter’s big, white, mildly-fangy smiles for the past five minutes.

Granted, that does set off Derek’s Beacon-Hills instincts, and he only finds himself relaxing once Stiles reaches Peter’s elbow and hooks an arm through it so he can semi-disguise how he’s desperately trying to buttock-squeeze Peter into backing off.

“That’s Professor Whateley, of the undecayed Whateleys,” Allison says. She stresses the ‘undecayed,’ but not in a mocking way, more like she’s repeating it without really knowing why. “Really big deal, wrote the textbook for my Intro to Eldritch Horrors seminar. He’s actually emeritus at this point, but apparently came out of retirement because he thinks the Nemeton’s really interesting.”

“He’s not the one who was slamming Stiles’ research, that was this other guy, Elias West,” Scott says, coming up to them. “He was actually kind of standing up for Stiles, but then Stiles said something he didn’t think was right and he corrected him, and that’s when everybody in the room kind of…did the ‘ooo’ thing. You know.”

“And then that West asshole sneaked out while Stiles apologized for making that kind of mistake, and things just wrapped up after that,” Allison says, frowning at the trio. “I wish I’d thought to see where he went, but Scott and I were busy trying to get up on stage and help Stiles wrap up so the next speaker could go. He was still really flustered and you could see he was having a hard time getting his laptop disconnected, and…yeah. I think Stiles needs a beer.”

Scott wraps an arm around Allison’s waist and looks on as Stiles and Peter finally start heading back towards them. “Honestly…he’s gonna need a couple,” Scott says, and then sighs when Derek glances at him. “He definitely tried really hard, and it was really great up till that question—and I still think it’s not going to be nearly as big of a deal as that guy made it sound. But…yeah.”

“It wasn’t good,” Allison says.

* * *

“It wasn’t really, you know,” Stiles tries to claim later, when they’re all seated out in the patio section of the biergarten. He waves his beer-holding hand vaguely, then yelps as foam sloshes out of his mug and down onto his wrist. Then pulls his arm in and sucks off some of the foam. “That _is_ an important angle to think about. I mean, I don’t think it’s the right angle, but still, it needs to be addressed and if I’m going to really push my theory, I have to rule it—oh, thanks!”

That’s to Laura, who’s just passed him a napkin. And who then grins toothily at a very annoyed Peter, who had been watching the sucking. “That may well be, but the way he brought it up was extremely—” Peter says, straightening up like he hadn’t been.

“You can’t just kill everybody who disagrees with me, Peter, that’s not how peer-reviewed research works,” Stiles sighs. He mops at his arm, then puts his beer down and flops back in his seat. From the way Peter suddenly shifts across the table, Derek’s pretty sure Stiles just started a game of footsie, and he gets confirmation when Stiles swaps his beer for the mini-sausages and, instead of biting them off the toothpicks, slurps them in end-first. “Even the University realized if you go that way, you run out of people to peer-review in the first place, and when you don’t have somebody willing to stand up and point out that hey, maybe we shouldn’t invite the Mi-Go to closed-door roundtables, everybody ends up stuffed into little metal tubes.”

“Well, if you insist on being magnanimous, which of course is your right,” Peter says, settling back in his chair. Beer in both hands, so his fingers can start sliding up and down the neck, because he’s staring at Stiles’ mouth more than he’s concentrating on his sarcasm. “Also, for the record, I never suggested murder.”

Stiles raises his brows. “Just gaslighting and character assassination. Embedded in a very detailed plan to psychologically manipulate people to make certain less-than-nonfatal choices about which labs they should request for next year, based on my dad’s preliminary fumigation results that you aren’t even supposed to have.”

“Free will is the one thing that, unlike many Earth religions, the Great Old Ones don’t contest, is it not?” Peter purrs, flicking his fingertips across the wet top of his bottle.

“Because it’s totally irrelevant because they’re going to overwhelm humanity anyway,” Stiles scoffs around the sausage he’s trying to hoover into his mouth.

Right about then, Derek runs out of beer and gets up to get a fresh one, since they’re a little out of the way for flagging down one of the waitstaff. Laura decides to come with him.

“What, the food-and-apocalypse flirting isn’t what does it for you?” she says, sauntering alongside him.

“No,” he says. And then, since she’s obviously going to stick to his hip, he goes on: “It can take them a while to get it out of their system and actually go anywhere with it, so might as well get another drink.”

Laura’s head swivels sharply around to face him. They walk up to the bar and he orders another, and when the bartender turns towards her, she lifts one hand and points at the tap, still staring at him. And then, just as he thinks he might have stunned her enough to get back to the table, she grins and smacks him on the shoulder.

“This is _so good_ for you, oh, my God,” she says, poking him again, just a little less hard. 

Derek stares at the bartender and wills him to hurry up with their beers.

“Oh, don’t do that. I’m just trying to do the sister thing and support,” Laura says, leaning against the bar. She tilts her head like she’s trying to look behind it, then tenses. Then abruptly pushes back before turning on Derek like she’d temporarily forgotten he was there.

She almost headbutts him, and there’s no ‘almost’ about how she tramples on his foot. And then she drops back, still smelling rattled, and grabs his arm.

“Sorry, nothing’s—God, I hate how sometimes flashbacks just…” she ducks her head for a second, then eyes the bartender, who seems preoccupied with a very complicated cocktail “…don’t freak out, because there’s nothing to freak out over. We cleared the place, I just…thought I saw something for a second.”

Derek hadn’t even had time to really react, but at that he stiffens too. “You saw something, like this is Beacon Hills and—”

“I _thought_ I saw something, like it’s this town and sometimes, even when it is actually over, you go back to where it happened because it’s _that_ small and you can’t just stay home all day, and you see the dents and scratches and boom, memory,” Laura mutters. She glances at the bartender again, then sighs and pulls absently at Derek’s arms. “Not a big deal, just…anybody tell you about the orbs?”

“Yeah, but it was Scott,” Derek says.

Laura and he make the same face. Then she shrugs and finally lets go of his arm. “They’re like the flea version of a ghost, apparently. Not strong enough to look human, but you get enough of them on you and they suck all the heat out. They actually weren’t that hard to deal with, just there were a lot of them.”

“You could’ve just left it to Scott. Sounded like he had everybody on it, like usual,” Derek says after a moment, watching her out of the corner of his eye.

“Yeah. Yeah, I could’ve.” The bartender makes a feint in their direction and Laura straightens up. Then slouches when it becomes clear he’s just grabbing some limes for yet another set of drinks that aren’t theirs. “I could just throw up my hands and not even bother calling myself alpha anymore.”

This isn’t the kind of thing Derek wants to get involved in, because he’s bad at it. And yet he opens his mouth: “Is this about Cora?”

“What? Why would it be about Cora?” Laura says, frowning. She’s convincing for about half a second, and then she switches to sarcasm. “Just because I’m the last surviving Hale who _doesn’t_ have a steady romantic interest doesn’t mean it has anything to do with her. Even though she can’t take a gaming computer that runs so hot it needs a liquid nitrogen tank and put that together and come up with exorbitant electric bill.”

Just then, the bartender finally looks up in their direction. “Sorry, you’re next, I just gotta get this eight-top out,” he says. 

Derek and Laura nod, and then they stand there while Laura runs her hand through her hair over and over again. Then, just as Derek’s gritting his teeth and about to say something, Laura sighs and bumps her elbow against him.

“It’s cool, by the way. I wasn’t…thinking he was going to be long-term. I mean, he was all right, but just not fireworks,” she mutters. “Just I thought _I_ was going to be the one pointing that out.”

“You weren’t?” Derek says.

Laura makes a face. “He’s heading back East now that his rotation’s up, so I was going to do it his last week at the Nemeton. But then we got side-tracked with the orbs and I had to reschedule, so when I show up to dinner, he does it over the appetizers.”

“I could…tell Stiles,” Derek says after a second. “You know his dad—”

“Oh, my God, I’m not Peter. People are allowed to break up with me and live,” Laura says, with a bit of a snort. She gives her hair one last rumple and then tucks her hands into her coat-pockets. “No, honestly, it was fine, it just…and then Cora comes in, all ‘Erica Erica Erica’ and…look, they’re good for each other. Erica hasn’t tried to get Scott to undermine me once since Cora moved in over there, and Cora picks less fights. I support it.”

“She’s just really annoying,” Derek says.

Laura rolls her eyes as a ‘yes.’ Then sighs again, looking at Derek. “I probably should just be happy electric bills are what I’m reduced to bitching about these days,” she says slowly. “I mean, I am happy. It’s a hell of a lot better than staying up all night, knowing I don’t know where all my betas are and that there’s a good chance they’re dead or hurt. So it’s great that Cora’s dating and you’re all settled and Peter can do his creepy flirting thing with somebody who thinks it’s hot. It really is. I guess I’m just…”

She lets her voice trail off, her eyes wandering past Derek to the patio where the rest of them are. She doesn’t smell alarmed, but Derek twists around and looks just in case. Melissa’s shown up, and half of the group are standing up so they can rearrange the seats, but that’s it.

“Look, we’re even coming back to the scene of our latest fight and actually hanging out, and except for me, nobody’s having traumatic flashbacks,” Laura suddenly goes on. When Derek turns back, their drinks are up and Laura’s taking hers. She also gets his and hands it over before leaning over the bar and grabbing a lime slice for her beer. “Don’t even know why, like I said, it wasn’t that bad…oh. Hey. Scott said you and his mom—”

“Not me, her and Peter,” Derek mutters, swigging some beer. Speaking of, Peter’s asking Melissa how the morgue is going and she’s rolling her eyes and they seem normal. “Or maybe that’s over. I don’t even know what the hell it was in the first place. She doesn’t even like me.”

“I think she likes you better than Peter. It’s not like you were trying to get Scott in trouble, most of the time,” Laura says. She lifts her folded arm and rests the elbow on Derek’s shoulder, then snickers when he shrugs her off. “For what it’s worth, I don’t think she meant it the way that Peter took it, though I also can see why he would’ve heard it that way. I think she just wanted to make sure Peter looked into it in case something was wrong.”

“By telling him I was starving to death?” Derek says.

Laura rolls her eyes. “No, she just—Scott’s her kid, remember. So if she’s trying to make sure Peter’s being a good semi-alpha, think about who she’s looking at for examples.”

“Well, but she’s worked with you for long enough, and she knows Scott’s weird,” Derek says.

“She also knows I wasn’t really prepared for Mom dying,” Laura says. Her tone is odd, in that it doesn’t seem to be anything in particular and she really just sounds like she’s making an observation. “I think I’ve gotten better, but she just doesn’t forget, you know, and…well, whatever. Looks like they must have talked it out at some point, so maybe we can all just move on.”

Then Laura slides on ahead of Derek. He lets her, partly because he’s still mulling over her attitude—sure, it’s true that Laura wasn’t ready to be pack alpha, but she also hates being called out on that—and partly because his phone’s buzzing. 

Everybody who’d normally call him up is out on the patio, so it’s probably about the film. Derek pauses to down half of his bottle, then answers the call.

 _“We’re fucked. See you for reshoots,”_ says the editor, and then she hangs up.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We are not going to address what Peter thinks Derek did because it's pretty irrelevant, honestly. Peter _always_ thinks Derek's done something.
> 
> Gemma is named for Gemma Files, who wrote (among other things) a pretty fantastic rebuttal to Lovecraft's ridiculously overwrought-antebellum South-style racist _Medusa's Coil_ in _Hairwork_.
> 
> Nadia is named for Nadia Bulkin, who's written some interesting Cthulhu Mythos stories where people of color get to be the sympathetic protagonists as well as providing the ethnic-folklore background. My fave so far is _Red Goat Black Goat_ , which is set in Southeast Asia. Speaking of, the Tcho-Tcho people are one of those random evil Asian races invented (not by Lovecraft, but he gave his seal of approval and referenced them later) to get Orientalism into the prejudice stew.
> 
> Averoigne is a fictional French province invented by Clark Ashton Smith and incorporated into the Mythos.
> 
> The Whateley family is from Lovecraft's _The Dunwich Horror_ , while Elias West may or may not be descended from _Herbert West - Reanimator_.


	4. Chapter 4

Derek isn’t a complete shut-in, so no, he doesn’t ruin the night and tell everybody he’s probably got to head back to the shoot. It’s not going to happen tonight and Stiles actually seems to be cheering up, so he figures he can put it off till the morning, when Stiles and Peter will be distracted with their grand plans to restore Stiles’ academic reputation. And in the meantime, he can at least enjoy a couple beers and a bowl of the place’s giant soft pretzels.

To be honest, he thinks, this isn’t really that bad. Yeah, there’s the issue with the shoot, and also how irritated Peter’s going to be, since now Derek’s going to have to take the car so Peter will have to use someone else’s to get himself and Stiles home. And probably also Cora, since if they’re doing reshoots, they’re not having a wrap party yet, which then means she’s probably going to annoy Laura again, and so Derek will end up with his entire family upset with him again. But…nobody’s in danger of dying. That’s different.

It should feel…nicer, he just has time to think, and then somebody clears their throat beside him and Derek looks up into Melissa’s face. “Mind if I snag one?” she says, calm and friendly, the way she does when she’s about to open up a verbal can of ass-whipping. “They’re taking forever with our refill, and I didn’t get to squeeze in much of a lunch today.”

Derek nods and pushes the bowl towards her as she seats herself in the chair across from him. He knows from watching Laura and Peter repeatedly go down in flames that opening his mouth is the one thing he should _not_ do, if he’s going to have any chance of getting out of this conversation without any scars. Hell, even _Stiles_ doesn’t try to argue with Melissa; he just plots around her and then suffers the scolding.

“Mmm,” Melissa says, tearing a bit off a pretzel and dunking it into the chipotle mayo. “God, these are so good.”

“Why do you even care what Peter and Laura do? It’s not like they were messing with Scott again,” Derek says.

Melissa’s eyes immediately flick up from the sauce container to Derek’s face. She keeps chewing, one side of her mouth twisted maybe a little more than it needs to be, which could be a frown. Behind her, Stiles is in the middle of some expansive explanation that involves him making contorted-arm gestures, which does nothing to block Scott’s suddenly-upraised head and very intent stare at the back of his mom’s head. Peter’s paying attention to Stiles but Laura is also watching, and she flicks a crumb at Peter, then hooks her chin in Derek’s direction.

“Oh, right,” Melissa says. She blinks a couple times, but smells calm.

Peter looks over, then grabs Laura’s arm as she starts to get up. She jerks sideways instead, and then looks annoyed as Scott hastily and loudly starts talking about how they could really use more bar nuts.

“I’m just,” Derek mutters, already regretting this. “Never mind.”

“Well, I don’t think you mean that,” Melissa says, still calm. She shifts back a little in her chair and her ponytail swings out, temporarily blocking Peter from view. When it swings back, Peter is—not there, while for some reason, Laura now seems much more annoyed by Scott’s pet squirrel, which is on the table and obliviously rooting through the nut bowl. “And I wanted to deal with that before you left, so this didn’t just fester into yet another grudge.”

“It’s not a grudge. We’re fine,” Derek says, while trying to figure out where the hell Peter’s gone. “Forget about it.”

Melissa exhales a little louder than she needs to and for a second he thinks she’s going to really lay into him. But then she just shakes her head. “Derek, I didn’t mean for you to take it like I was—was criticizing Peter, or that I thought you can’t look after yourself.”

“Wait, you told him to stop starving me,” Derek says. “How does that not—”

“I told him you’d been taking John’s snacks and he shrugged it off, and I may have gotten a little annoyed that he wasn’t taking it seriously,” Melissa says, with a small, annoyed huff. Then she shakes herself, and looks back at Derek. “The mom in me came out, I guess, and I probably was more sarcastic than I needed to be, but honestly, I just wanted to make sure if something was going on, you two worked it out. I _know_ I don’t really understand your family—if I’ve learned something after all these years, it’s that. But also, I know you all do actually consider yourselves a family, even if the way you seem to show it to each other is…not how I would. So that’s all that was, and I’m sorry for overstepping. All right?”

Derek stares at her.

This obviously is about what Melissa was expecting him to do, because she just waits another second, then gives him a nod and gets up. As she does, her eyes track a little back and to the left: Peter, who’s frozen in the act of squeezing by Stiles’ chair and who has a rare look of shock on his face. 

“Oh, for…I don’t _hate_ any of you, let’s just get that straight,” she says, sighing again. “I might want you to just stop pretending like you’re the only important thing in this town, good or bad—Laura, _nobody_ at this point cares whether you’re just like your mother except you and the idiot rogues we keep having to beat off—but that’s not hatred. Look, we’ve all been working together for a while, so if I can just be a mom for one more second, just take a day off from being ‘A Hale.’ I don’t think it’ll kill you.”

Then Melissa moves on, stopping briefly to hug Scott and give Allison a peck on the cheek. She tells Stiles that he’s brilliant and this is not going to be his last presentation, by any stretch, and Stiles blinks hard before belatedly saying thanks and please at least keep his dad away from the Oreos.

“No promises, Stiles. He’s on the graveyard shift and you know you burn twice as many calories during that stretch,” Melissa says, grinning, and then she leaves.

“That is a patent lie and…okay, then, not that that matters,” Stiles says, staring after her. He blinks again, sits down, and then abruptly twists around to look around the group. “Okay, so…obviously, this is one of those shared-history things I wasn’t around for, but I still feel like I got steamrolled by it so—”

“It’s okay,” Derek says.

Stiles looks at him.

“No, really, Derek’s not exaggerating,” Peter says. He and Laura share a bemused look, and then he sits back down in a way that somehow requires him to run his hand from Stiles’ shoulder into the wrinkled, baggy collar of Stiles’ buttondown. “It’s all right.”

“Really? Because from where I’m sitting, it looked like Scott’s mom just handed you both your—ow!” And then Cora grabs her ribs and glares at Laura. “What the hell?”

“Forget about the electric bill,” Laura says, ignoring her and reaching for the bowl of bar nuts a waiter’s just plunked down.

Cora stutters out of her glower. “What—really?”

“Yeah, really,” Laura says, and then frowns as the bowl suddenly jerks away from her. She reaches for it again and then lets out an annoyed snort as Scott, flushing, darts his hand out and grabs his squirrel from behind the bowl; his squirrel’s tail fans down and out so that each tentacle snags a last nut on its way up into the air. Laura takes a nut and eats it anyway (sometimes Derek agrees with Peter about their genetic idiocy). “I mean, you don’t really live there anymore. Of course, this also means no more free groceries. What’s in the fridge is in there for me and Braeden and what’s his name, Boyd’s stray—”

“Jamel,” Allison supplies, though she’s also distracted by the squirrel. “Why is he eating so _much_? Nobody’s starving him.”

“I don’t know,” Scott says, cuddling Quint to his chest and looking worried. “I think I’m going to have Alan check him out in the morning.”

“But—” Cora sputters, ignoring them both.

“Fair’s fair, and I do believe your sister’s done her numbers correctly for once,” Peter says, leaning back against Stiles’ arm. “And shockingly, all is right in our family.”

* * *

“Well, but is it really?” Stiles asks Derek later that night, just when Derek thinks the man’s gotten distracted again by stuff for symposium day two. “C’mon, Derek, you do a good seriously-built statue impression, but I know you’re still awake.”

Derek wasn’t actually pretending to sleep; he’s just lying on the bed because the two chairs in the guest room are taken up with luggage and if he gets up and moves them off to have somewhere to sit, he probably also has to check his phone, which is lying on the table between the chairs. And if he checks his phone, he’ll have to get up to date on the reshoot plans, which he doesn’t want to do. This is all logically flawed and he realizes that. He just also is working up the energy to give a damn about it.

So instead he rolls over. Stiles twitches, eyes widening as they flick up and down Derek’s torso, and then hikes his shoulders, like that’s going to do anything about his blush or about the way he’s suddenly smelling. Then he makes a face and shoves his laptop onto the side-table. “Okay, I’m done for tonight. Really. I can’t get out a rebuttal till I get back to one of the restricted-access terminals and even if I could, nobody’s going to read it till this conference is over. And anyway I’m just a grad student at this point and nobody gives a damn about my theories and they’re all going to be watching for whether West and Pickman get into it tomorrow during the panel on Physiology versus Biological Anthropology.”

“I don’t even follow why that’s an argument,” Derek says. “It’s a tree. Like a _plant_.”

Stiles had looked a little surprised that Derek even remembers him explaining that whole academic feud, but he gets over it and grins, flopping himself a few inches further down the headboard. His arm bounces off the bed and hovers over Derek’s head and shoulder for an awkwardly long second. “Well, I could break down for you where Miskatonic took issue with Linnaeus’ system, but short version, Botany busted too many labs last year. They don’t have the security waivers to really do Nemeton studies, and this is the hottest ticket to research grants in a decade, so everybody’s trying to find an angle on it.” 

Derek snorts, and then shifts up the bed, just as Stiles starts to pull that arm back in. “Well, just don’t tell Scott, I don’t think he’s going to be big on people taking samples.”

“What? No, are you kidding? It’s clearly sentient, you don’t just start cutting off little bits and _not_ expect it to develop a worldwide network of die-hard fanatics ready to murder you after a couple nightmares,” Stiles scoffs. His arm lingers in the air for another second, then cautiously drops to curl over Derek’s shoulder. When Derek just gives up and stuffs his head into Stiles’ stomach (yeah, it’s nice to have somebody think about his reaction, but also, sometimes he wishes Stiles would think about the fact that Derek gave him a spare car key), Stiles makes an odd squeaky grunt and clutches at Derek for a second. Then settles down, his hand drifting from Derek’s shoulder to Derek’s side. “Anyway, so…”

“It’s been an okay trip,” Derek says, sensing where Stiles’ tone is going with that. He watches Stiles’ fingers, which had been starting to skirt the edge of his abs, freeze. “It is. Which is—not how it usually goes. Look, I get I should just shut up and take it.”

“Well, you don’t have to shut up. I mean, you can if you want, and I know that usually _is_ what you want, but…” Stiles sighs “…okay, I’m tired, and I know I get convoluted for you when I’m trying to not, so I’m just trying to say—”

“I think it’s just weird. It’s not normal…not for me, but this is actually what normal is for most people. And I don’t want to think about that that much, because I’m actually okay with this,” Derek says.

Stiles makes a noise, showing that he’s listening, but then is quiet for a few seconds. The shower also just went off so Derek thinks at first the other man might be expecting Peter to come in, but then Stiles hums and splays his fingers over Derek’s belly. “Dad gets a little weird in between semesters sometimes,” he says. “Most of the time there’s something left over from exams that he’s still trying to clean up, but there are these couple weeks in late July, early August where he can just let his team work and he doesn’t have to look at proposals for the incoming research, and he starts watching horror movies and drawing up mock-drill plans based off them.”

“He can come out and stay with Melissa and Chris this year, can’t he?” Derek says.

“Well, yeah, and I think they’re already talking about going up to Washington to visit some family property of Chris’, but then Dad gets so snarky with the emojis whenever he’s had more than a week with them,” Stiles says mournfully. He sighs and at the same time, his hand smooths out along the length of Derek’s abdominal muscles, slow and soothing. “Okay, so that’s probably better. It’s going to be interesting, anyway. First year I won’t have to talk the head librarian down from sabotaging Dad’s Netflix subscription.”

“I’m not going to start looking for things to fight just because nothing’s coming after me,” Derek says after a moment. The petting is starting to get to him, in spite of the way his shoulder muscles keep trying to tense up whenever Peter moves around in the bathroom; there is no way Peter is not eavesdropping on this conversation, no matter what privacy spells they’ve got down, and yet Derek can’t really bring himself to be worried about it. “I’m not actually that big on fighting, whatever people say.”

Stiles makes his silence very skeptical. It doesn’t come up much, because he’d rather talk your ear off, but when he wants to, he can make his lack of talking as pointed as Derek can.

“I’m _okay_ with it too, but I just…I’m fine if I don’t have to,” Derek says, feeling his shoulders tighten. And then loosen up, as Stiles’ fingertips flex in and start to gently drag in circles around his bellybutton. He thinks about just leaning into it, but they wouldn’t be having this conversation if he was, in fact, capable of just letting things go. “I’m pretty sure I will be, anyway. This might be the longest stretch where I get to see.”

“Really?” Stiles says, startled. Then he smells embarrassed, and his rubbing speeds up briefly. “I mean, I just thought—you moved to New York to get away from this.”

“Well, yeah, Beacon Hills. Didn’t mean I got to get away from fighting,” Derek says. He hears Peter’s feet padding across the hallway and starts to lift his head, then makes himself stop that. “I wasn’t an omega, but that didn’t stop a lot of people from trying to act like I was. Or trying to make me one. And anyway, I still came back here every month, or close to it—things kept happening and I wasn’t just going to leave my pack to deal with it.”

“Oh, I wasn’t saying you were, I just…” the embarrassment abruptly drops out of Stiles’ scent in favor of lust, and then comes right back “…we are literally under my dad’s _bed_.”

“I left my shirt in here, Stiles,” Peter says, mildly reprimanding. He goes around the end of the bed, digs around in their bags, and then comes back to start crawling onto Stiles’ side of the mattress. “If it bothers you that much, of course I’ll put it all, but it is such a warm night…”

Stiles doesn’t say anything because Stiles is busy gluing his eyes to Peter’s damp chest. Peter admittedly does make that look good, and Derek doesn’t mind the view either, but…that might be it for tonight. Derek doesn’t think he’s got _that_ kind of issue, but he just doesn’t feel like working up the low, warming looseness in his gut into anything more energetic. Not right now. Which is weird in and of itself, since he really hasn’t done that much today and yet he’s lying around feeling like he could just go right to sleep, and…

He can do that, he thinks. If he wants.

“Or if Derek would rather,” Peter says, just enough crispness in his tone to make Derek look up. He’s not annoyed, but he’s…interested. Or something. He pulls himself up by Stiles, still looking Derek over enough to let Derek know there will not be any sleeping yet. “Though you two do look comfortable.”

“Well, we were trying,” Derek mutters.

Stiles blinks hard, and then grins warmly, his hand sliding nearly under the waistband of Derek’s sweats. And after the first second, Peter looks almost as pleased about Derek’s sarcasm. He must be in a good mood again; usually he can’t make up his mind whether Derek lacks backbone or sufficient respect for his elders. “ _Do_ keep on trying, in that case,” he says, leaning over Stiles in a way that makes Derek suddenly aware of where his mouth is in relation to Derek’s exposed throat. “Never let it be said that Peter Hale got in the way of enjoying yourself.”

“Oh, I think you get in the way of that plenty,” Stiles starts, tone a familiar blend of annoyed and creeping affection. And then he pulls himself back and looks down at Derek.

So does Peter, and this whole…Peter being nice, okay, this is not so new now. They’re in a relationship that doesn’t require Derek to constantly defend himself or Peter to look after him. Derek gets that. But it’s still…

It’s always been something he wanted. It just hasn’t always been something he thought he could admit he wanted. And he’s used to acting like he doesn’t want it, so he’ll be prepared when he doesn’t get it.

Which is why he says, “I’m going to have to leave early tomorrow. They need—reshoots, I have to go back for a couple days.”

The way Peter’s forehead creases in irritation, and the frown Stiles gets on his face right then, those are all things Derek has learned to expect, so no surprise there. But the way _Derek_ feels frustrated at seeing them, like he could murder somebody just for that—that’s different. He doesn’t get angry like that anymore, not that much. He’s too used to, or should be too used to, this.

“Well, I suppose I’ll have to rent something for us,” is, weirdly, all Peter says. He smells as annoyed with Derek as he usually is, but just drops back against the headboard rather than continue to pick at the wound. No, actually, he’s reaching for his phone on the end-table. “Do you think your father could have someone give me a ride? If not, I can ask Laura, but if I know my nieces, she’ll be busy dealing with Cora’s idea of an apology tomorrow.”

“Oh, was _that_ what all that skulking around and stealing Scott’s pretzels was about? Listen, I am as judgment-free as a guy who’s spent a field season with the Elder Thing ruins in Antarctica can be, but your family’s ways of relating to each other defy sixteen different schools of anthropological coding, just so you know,” Stiles says. He’s still got his hand on Derek’s stomach, and after a second, he starts petting with it again, even though he’s clearly more interested in whatever Peter’s got up on his phone. “Dad can probably spare somebody. Or—”

“You’re going to get a rental?” Derek says.

“Obviously, Derek, I’m not about to try walking out of this town again,” Peter says, swiping at his phone. Then he looks up, frowning. “You’re taking your car. You always take your car.”

“Yeah, I do,” Derek says.

Peter’s frown deepens. “Was there some doubt? I do remember the last time someone tried to give you the rental instead. So does Chris, I’m sure, and I believe we’re currently trying to get _back_ on Melissa’s good side.”

“No, I wasn’t—arguing. I just…never mind,” Derek says. He watches as Peter and Stiles go back to consulting Peter’s phone, starting to debate the merits of various car models and how their upholstery might react to chalk and _Necronomicon_ excerpts.

This is weird.

And Derek’s not, he decides, going to do anything about it. He’s just going to lie here and see what happens, and he actually thinks he might be getting used to the idea of that.

* * *

The next morning, Stiles doesn’t oversleep by as much, though they still end up having to eat breakfast in the car. The asshole producer tries to call Derek twice and leaves a voicemail going on and on about this being a blessing in disguise to up their game and whatever else Derek doesn’t hear because he sticks his phone in his pocket for the message to run out, and instead listens to Peter nagging him about remembering Stiles’ San Francisco-commute schedule so if Derek comes back when they’re not in, he uses the right entry wards. Which is kind of a relief, because Derek had been starting to wonder if Peter might be possessed.

Eventually Peter has to stop so he and Stiles can go to the first round of presentations and begin their plan to strategically question other speakers so they forget how Stiles got embarrassed the day before. Derek kind of thinks this is just going to result in a lot of arguing, because nobody actually likes being shown up in public, but he’s not an academic studying eldritch aliens so what does he know.

“No, I was thinking the same thing, actually,” Scott says, while looking anywhere but Derek. He even goes up on his toes and tries to peer over Derek’s head, and then looks embarrassed when Derek just slides to the side. “Allison was trying to tell Stiles last night it’s too soon and nobody’s going to want to revisit it just the day after, but I think sometimes Stiles just needs to feel like he’s gotten started on…um, have you seen Quint?”

“No,” Derek says. He watches Scott attempt to peer under every chair in the hallway without actually ducking under them. “I thought you were taking him to Deaton.”

“We were, but Alan said Stiles’ dad might actually be a better bet, because Alan doesn’t really specialize in small animals and anyway, none of his machines are calibrated for the pseudo-Cthulhic element,” Scott says, still distracted. “And then he just slipped out of my pocket somewhere.”

Derek eyes the people milling in and out of the hallway. The next set of speakers should be going, but there are still enough for some stares to come his and Scott’s way. Which isn’t really Derek’s problem, but…he suppresses a sigh and pulls Scott into the nearest room so they can regroup without that.

“Does he show up on your phone?” Derek asks when Scott gives him a questioning look. “Like on one of the apps that Stiles—”

“Not really,” Scott says, though he’s still pulling his phone out. “I mean, he sort of did, but then it got really weird and kept showing multiples of him, and I was going to ask Stiles to check the settings but never got around to it last night. He _is_ better, right?”

“Yeah,” Derek says.

Scott pokes at his phone, then frowns. “Oh, good. And you?”

Derek stares at him.

“I mean, you and Mom…had that thing,” Scott says, wiggling one shoulder uncomfortably. Though it being him, he then takes a deep breath and looks up and looks Derek in the eye. “I think that got cleared up and everything, but I just wanted to make sure you weren’t still mad? I really didn’t think she meant it that way, but if it came across like it anyway…well, I’m sure she wouldn’t mind talking it out.”

“I’m good,” Derek says.

“You don’t have to, just if it would help. I don’t think she or I want to make you do things you don’t want—and I get sometimes why it might not seem like that,” Scott says, with a deprecating smile. He lowers his phone a little. “We really annoy you, don’t we?”

The thing about Scott isn’t that he’s so hellbent on making the world better, even when his life doesn’t have to be on the line for it. It’s that he knows he’s that way, and knows other people don’t agree with that, and just…is okay that they don’t agree. The guy’s going to try anyway, and if he can help them out too, he will, despite them not wanting to work with him, and he just never gets resentful over it. 

“You probably were glad you moved away from my messes too, along with everything else,” Scott goes on, without a bit of guilt-tripping or accusation in it. “But look, even if we’re not friends, I just want you to know that—”

“We’re not,” Derek starts, and then stops himself. Then grimaces and makes himself keep going. “I don’t hate you. Or your mom. We’re not enemies.”

“Yeah, I know, but I’m Stiles’ friend, right?” Scott says. He holds Derek’s gaze for a second, completely unruffled, and then shrugs. “It’s cool, you know. I think I did have this phase in high school when I really wanted to show I was…you know, I was worth all this ‘true alpha’ stuff I just _got_ , but that was pretty silly, now that I look back on it. And I’m sorry for how annoying I must have been then. But I’m over that and I’m—well, I’m glad you don’t _hate_ me, but also you don’t have to like me just because of Stiles, or my mom, or anything like that.”

“It wasn’t even really a big deal,” Derek says after a second. “What your mom did. It was just—out of the blue, and I think it needed to get aired out, but it did and we’re done. I am, anyway.”

Scott shrugs again. “Okay.”

“And you’re…less annoying now,” Derek finds himself saying.

For a second, surprise flattens out Scott’s expression. He stares at Derek, eyes wide, and then he starts to smile.

Except then his eyes track behind Derek and flash red. Derek promptly spins around, putting himself to Scott’s left, only for Scott to grab his arm and pull them both down. “I thought we got rid of all of them!” Scott hisses, looking at a soap bubble floating about a foot above where Derek’s head had been. “Okay, um, I don’t have—look, back slowly towards the door and then we’ll shut this room up for a couple minutes while I go get Allison.”

“What?” Derek says. Not because he’s disagreeing with Scott’s orders, but because it’s a bubble.

“It’s an—that’s an orb,” Scott says, still watching the bubble.

It really doesn’t look any different from a soap bubble, but when Scott warns you about something, he’s always right (his problem is not doing that more often), so Derek goes with it and duckwalks backwards with Scott till they hit the doorway. Literally, because Derek misremembered where it was and bangs his elbow into the jamb.

“Oh, no, they heard!” Scott hisses.

Derek looks up, sees a torrent of orbs suddenly fountain up from a dark corner of the room, and then gets blinded because some asshole’s legs run into his back and then the rest of the asshole falls over the top of him.

“What are you cretins _doing_?” grunts a familiar male voice.

The asshole to which it belongs, who is now pulling himself up from the floor of the room, is not familiar, so it’s not till he moves and makes his lanyard twist so Derek can see the badge that Derek recognizes him: Elias West. 

“Sir, you need to stay down and keep your voice down,” Scott says.

“Excuse me?” the asshole says, more loudly. He stares at Scott, then snorts and adjusts his glasses. “And just who are you? You _must_ be through one of the exchange programs. I swear, the standards just keep getting more and more diluted—”

“Tell Allison,” Scott says over his shoulder, and then he goes back to trying to talk the man into lowering his voice.

Derek yanks his phone out and points the camera at the orbs that are gathering above West, meaning to video-call Allison so she can see. But just then Scott starts to crawl over Derek’s knee, back into the room, and Derek remembers something about hypothermia and—Scott is such a goddamn idiot. And Derek can’t just sit there, so he jerks around and grabs Scott’s ankle, pulling him up just as the orbs suddenly drop on West.

“No, he’s going to—no!” Scott shouts, yanking against Derek’s hold. “No! Move towards the light! The light!”

“What the hell’s going on?” comes a yell from further down the hall. Then Stiles’ dad jogs around the corner.

“Orbs!” Scott shouts. “They got him!”

Stiles’ dad pauses for a second, but just to take his phone and a little metal thing out of his pocket. Then he runs the rest of the way to the doorway, and when he gets there, he sticks his phone out with the metal thing plugged into the top and chants something. There’s a bright flash of light that makes Derek duck his head into his arm.

When he looks up again, Stiles’ dad is standing over a curled-up body on the floor, pushing Scott back as Scott tries to reach the person. “No, give him a sec,” Stiles’ dad is saying. “His vitals are going to come around by themselves and I don’t want to have to put you _both_ into quarantine.”

“Okay, just, with the others it took a while,” Scott is saying, sounding worried. “A couple almost got frostbite.”

“Well, that might teach him to go messing with my security wards,” Stiles’ dad mutters, looking at something on his phone. “They were airtight at precheck this morning, and now all three of you are in here and I know you and Derek didn’t take them down, so what West was doing in here, I’d like to—”

A small, clicking burr noise comes from near Derek’s knee. Derek looks down and finds a squirrel looking back at him, tail-tentacles idly coiling over its head. At the same time, West groans feebly. “I _knew_ I wasn’t seeing things,” the man says. “That wasn’t in the _documentation_ , Stilinski.”

They look at him, and then at the squirrel. Then Scott swoops down and cups his hands protectively around the squirrel. “You were chasing Quint?” he says, eyes reddening.

“Yeah, it was, under ‘sentient and possibly networked,’ which means it’s covered under research consent protocols, West,” Stiles’ dad says. “As in, you can’t just grab it and take samples without permission from _it_.”

“Samples?” Scott growls, eyes full alpha now.

Stiles’ dad looks over. “Scott, let’s just—”

Another squirrel hops in between him and Scott. It’s looking at West, who despite the warnings is still eyeing it as if he’s sizing it up for a glass slide. “Is it…smaller?” Derek says.

“Oh. Oh, you know…” And Scott unfolds his hands to study the other one. “Wait. You’re not Quint. You don’t have his nose.”

West starts to wheeze something. From the expression on his face, it’s probably going to be scathing, except he never gets a chance to actually say it because suddenly a bunch of tiny squirrels with tail-tentacles bounce into view, forming a loose circle around him. And they’ve all got orbs floating over their tails—orbs that their tentacles suddenly seize and fling into West’s face when his mouth moves.

“Oh, for—” Stiles’ dad curses and fumbles with his phone. “Okay, _no_ , I know he’s not earning any points here but we have inter-species mediation panels for a _reason_ —”

“Quint!” Scott cries, twisting around and scooping up a squirrel that is at least twice as big as the rest of them. “There you are! Oh, wow, so this is why you needed all that food…um, listen, I think we have this guy under control so could you not kill him? That’s a lot of work for Stiles’ dad. Please?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Small animals are a whole different ballgame from dogs and cats, and also, I think it would legitimately slip Scott's mind that Deaton only really got to work directly with Cthulhic anything starting a little less than a year ago. He just believes that much in his friends.
> 
> Elias is possibly a descendant of Herbert West, which is Lovecraft's character from _Herbert West - Reanimator_ who never met anything he didn't want to slice 'n dice in a lab.
> 
> Goat of a Thousand Young _was_ the Great Old One that took out the Nemeton in the first installment of this series, if you recall. And Great Old Ones say 'hah!' to your humanoid gender classifications.


	5. Chapter 5

“Look, I saw it. That thing thought about it and then it looked all annoyed with Scott but it twitched its tail and suddenly they all went away,” Derek says.

Stiles consults something on his phone, then shrugs. “Well, that _is_ within the range of its initial sentience assessment. I know it’s pretty uncanny valley, but—”

“I’m not creeped out that it can think, I’m creeped out by the fact that the _little_ ones went away,” Derek says, pulling his phone out.

In all of the hurry, it turns out he hit ‘record’ rather than call, so he’s got footage of the entire thing. Including the moment when Scott’s pet squirrel fanned out its tail and all the other squirrels rushed up to it and then just…vanished. Derek’s going to think about it as vanishing, because that’s what makes his skin crawl the least.

“Fascinating, isn’t it? Not only parthenogenesis, but reabsorption as well,” Peter says, leaning over Derek’s shoulder.

Of course, no matter what Derek does, his family ends up shoving him into what he doesn’t want anyway. He pushes Peter away, then tries to find the part of the video showing the tiny versions of Scott’s pet absor-merging into the tail of the big one. Merging. Merging produces slightly less disturbing images in Derek’s head.

“Oh! Oh, that part? That’s what creeps you out?” Stiles says, looking up with a frown. Then his shoulders hunch and he flushes a little. “I mean, of course you can have an opinion and it is, um, nonstandard, but…well, werewolf?”

“I don’t see how being a werewolf is supposed to make me be okay with a mutant squirrel who can pop out mini-clones whenever it feels like,” Derek mutters, distracted by his phone. He glances down at it and finds a text from the film editor, asking him whether he’s seriously trying to get out of the reshoot. Annoyed, because he’d _explained_ why he was running late, Derek sends her a clip from the video. “They just _went away_.”

“I know, but you do that too?” Stiles says, still looking genuinely baffled. He’s a little tentative too, his eyes flicking to the side like he might just excuse himself. “Like the fur?”

Derek looks at him. “That doesn’t go away the same way. They—look, if you put them all together, they would be eight or nine times the original’s size, but it’s not like that one grew.”

“But…mass-shifting?” Stiles says. “You know. That thing you do where your ears grow and your jawbone gets a two-inch extension?”

“But my body parts don’t split off and run around on their own!” Derek says. At which point Peter growls at him, because his voice is getting loud, and he was already wincing anyway because Stiles just flinched, and he ducks his head and stares at his phone instead.

“Fair point,” Stiles is saying.

“Derek, I think we understand you didn’t like it, and there’s no reason for you to…” Peter is saying.

But Derek isn’t really listening, because the editor’s asking him for more footage. He double-checks what he sent, but yeah, it was showing the squirrels hopping away from a prone West. Then again…that wasn’t the part of the video with the orbs, and maybe she just didn’t make the connection between West and the squirrels. He pulls up the whole video, snips out an earlier clip, and shoots it off. 

“…besides, the real interest here is…are you even paying attention?” Peter says, exasperated.

“Yes,” Derek says. Then looks up into Peter’s arched brow and eye-flick down towards the phone in his hand. “Look, I’m just trying to explain to them that I’m going to be late to the reshoot because things got weird.”

“Oh, I totally forgot, I’m so sorry!” Stiles immediately turns around and starts looking for someone. “Right, well, let me just flag a Security person. The blanket cover story’s supposed to be that we had a few virtual-reality presentations and we can probably tweak that real easy to make a fake traffic jam over some poor guerilla-marketing deployment choices—”

Derek’s phone pings again. It’s the editor, asking if he has any angles where the face is more than half-turned towards him. He stares at it a second, then just calls her.

 _“Because this is good, I can work with this. Grandma just sent me some filters to swap the faces, but they have side-effects,”_ is her answer. _“I could just set up something to help with that if you have no more angles, I just need to know so Nadia can go out and buy the mushroom powder for it.”_

“Isn’t that how you people got that guy to turn from a _kanima_ back to a person?” Derek says. “What side-effect are you talking about here?”

“Wait, what?” Stiles says. 

The editor sighs. _“Fine. I will deal with this. Do not show up, we are not filming now so a camera is unnecessary.”_

“Okay—wait, this is Stiles’ professor!” Derek snaps, but she hangs up on him anyway. He yanks his phone down from his ear, biting back a growl and takes a half-step towards the door before someone stops him.

Peter, who’s cocking his head and looking a little less annoyed than Derek would have expected. “Was that that one editor who’s part-ghoul?”

“Yeah. Yeah, and I sent her the video of the—the tiny squirrels and West because I thought she’d get it, at least, but now I think she’s trying to use it to replace the footage we lost,” Derek says. Someone down the hall calls out in a frustrated tone and Derek twitches, then peers past Peter’s shoulder. Turns out it’s not Stiles’ dad, but they’re probably still going to have to loop in him so that doesn’t make Derek feel any better. “She’s doing that magic ghoul Photoshopping thing or whatever and says there’s going to be side-effects and I did _not_ tell her she could use it for that and—”

“He’s not actually my professor,” Stiles says. When Derek looks over, Stiles is rubbing his chin and looking thoughtfully at the wall. “He’s not really a professor at all. I mean, he definitely has the publication cites, but he’s not affiliated with any institution. Basically burned his bridges with them all.”

“And he _was_ very disrespectful to you,” Peter muses.

Stiles looks a little guilty. “Well, he did have a good point, actually,” he says, and then his face clears. “On the other hand, he also just violated the conference’s security policy, its on-site conduct policy, and he technically only hasn’t violated the Kingsport Edict On Inhuman Intelligences because I don’t think anybody’s explained to Quint that he can report West under that.”

“Isn’t the violation of the security policy alone enough to trigger an interview with the enforcement arm of Security? What is their post-interview institutionalization rate again?” Peter says. He lets the question hang in the air, then starts to shrug dismissively—but then his eyes land on Derek. His expression shifts oddly, and then he takes in a little breath. “Well, Derek, I was going to suggest we reinstate our dinner plans and see if Melissa will accept one more at the table, but if you’d rather go see what’s going on with your shoot instead…”

“What?” Derek says, and then he really thinks about it. Really thinks about it. Because weirdly, life (and his family) is letting him do that for once. And it’s…nice.

He could get used to this. More importantly, he could _fight_ to get used to this.

“No, that’s okay,” he says a moment later. “She wants to see me eat more anyway, right?”

“It’s elotes and grilled-chicken night, too,” Stiles says, his eyes lighting up. “Scott’s mom’s elotes are the _best_.”

Well, honestly, Derek can’t disagree with that.

* * *

“So, like I said at the start, this is totally up to you. We’re not trying to force you into anything, we just think maybe some clarity about boundaries would help both sides here, and also, you should know what your rights are if you want to invoke them,” Stiles says, doing his best imitation of Scott’s sincere-helper voice. He pats the stack of paper on his left, then on his right. “So that’s the draft, and those are the printouts explaining all the different treaties and conventions, and…”

“It’s a lot to go through, I know, so maybe you’d like a couple days to read through and digest?” Allison breaks in, with a sweet smile and a subtle elbow to Stiles’ ribs. Then she loops an arm over his shoulders so it looks natural when he backs into her. “Scott’s going to be locked in his room studying for his practicum so all you and I should have to do is just make sure he’s eating. So you’ve got time.”

Quint regards them quietly, his tentacles furling and unfurling gently over his head. His forepaw twitches and Allison’s hand clamps down on Stiles’ shoulder, but actually, he just seems to be cramping a little. Then he lifts his head a little and flattens his tail, and…sort of sheds a bunch of tiny versions from it. They scoot around him and each grab a page and then start toting them away towards the closet where Scott’s fitted up one shelf as a hutch.

“Okay, then, meet back here with questions after Saturday dinner,” Stiles says. “Cool.”

A couple minutes later, when he and Allison are outside the apartment, he can’t help but make that a question. “Cool?”

“Oh, yeah, I think so. If he wasn’t at least a little interested, he would’ve just started eating it in front of you,” Allison says. She’s distracted by looking for something in her purse. “That’s what he does whenever the sheriff tries to nail Scott with a speeding ticket.”

“Well, just because he eats them doesn’t mean they go away,” Stiles says, frowning.

Allison snorts. “Actually, it kind of does. I’m not totally sure how it works but it deletes them from the system too. Jordan went in and checked a few times, and…oh, there, I knew I had this in here somewhere.”

She takes out her car keys plus a little plastic baggie that contains an acorn. Which, upon closer examination, turns out to have a distinctive octopus-like pattern in the scales in its cap. So why she’s giving Stiles _that_ look five minutes later when they’re in her car, when she gave that to him, is beyond him.

“I said, so you think these ‘Rules of Engagement’ are going to help?” she says.

“They helped Derek and Peter a lot just coming up with the draft. Derek hates talking about feelings and Peter doesn’t like admitting he’s not controlling the conversation, so it was a good excuse to get that stuff out in the open,” Stiles says. He makes himself put the acorn away for later—they’re going through a bad patch so he doesn’t have enough reception for his phone to stay connected to Miskatonic’s library app anyway—and glances over at her. “You’re taking this pretty well, by the way.”

“Oh, that’s just because Quint and I had a good talk a month ago and already worked through this,” Allison says, like she didn’t just admit to having a conversation with a new form of a pseudo-Cthulhic creature _and not immediately telling Stiles_. “He’s—okay, well, really it’s him plus the Nemeton, right? Anyway, they’re really straightforward about what they want here: less death, Scott happy, clean air and fresh water, and a pound of unshelled peanuts a week. Which I can definitely live with. But look, I remember how it got kind of bizarre before that, so I’m sympathetic. It’ll just take Derek and Peter a while to get used to it, but I think it’ll all work out.”

Stiles notes the ‘peanuts’ in his phone (he’s also noting the failure to give him a heads-up, but he knows better than to pick a fight with an Argent in a car they’re driving). “Yeah, I hope so. I think we’ve…I’m not going to jinx it by calling a routine, but I think we have a workable understanding, more or less.”

“That’s definitely important around here,” Allison nods. She slows up at a red light and for a second, she and Stiles sit in comfortable silence.

“Just curious, do you think—”

“Honestly, Stiles, never mind Derek, do _you_ actually want one of the mini-Quints running around your place?” Allison says. “Did I tell you they refilled my birth control for me?”

Stiles stutters on his breath. “What?”

“I forgot to get it from the drugstore because of a last-minute patrol.” Allison pauses and when he checks, she’s a little flushed and staring straight ahead. She still finishes the story. “So Scott and I are home, and we’re…you know, but then I remember I’m out and can’t get till the morning, and we’re out of condoms too because we had to use them on…long story, anyway. I tell him, and he’s, you know, Scott, so we just do a rain-check for tomorrow and I go into the bathroom to splash some cold water on my face and Quint’s there holding up the drugstore bag.”

“That’s…nice?” Stiles finally says.

Allison grimaces. “Yeah. Yeah. It’s thoughtful, right? That he’s watching us _so closely_. That’s when we talked, actually,” she mutters. “I told him just text me a reminder next time.”

“Okay, you know, I can just be Uncle Stiles and visit every other weekend,” Stiles says. “Because boundaries. Yeah. Those are good. Yep.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The ability to do degrees of supernaturalness is one of my favorite things about this series.
> 
> Anyway, so with the speaking, remember the Nemeton can speak through Quint. And of course Stiles would briefly think it's cool to have his own little Quint clone at home, but I think he's got enough with Derek and Peter to not need a pet added in.


End file.
